Seaborne

NUALA O’CONNOR is a novelist, short story writer and poet, and lives in Co. Galway with her family. Nuala holds a BA in Irish from Trinity College Dublin and a Masters in Translation Studies (Irish/English) from Dublin City University. She is the author of five previous novels, including Nora (New Island & Harper Perennial, 2021), Becoming Belle (2018) and Miss Emily (2015), and six short story collections, her most recent being Joyride to Jupiter (New Island, 2017). She has won many prizes for her short fiction, including the Francis MacManus Award, the James Joyce Quarterly Fiction Contest and the UK’s Short Fiction Journal Prize.Nuala’s work has also been nominated for numerous prizes including the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year and the International Dublin Literary Award. Nora was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, the Dalkey Novel of the Year Award, RTÉ Audience Choice Award and named as a Top 10 2021 historical novel by the New York Times. Nora was also the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala curated the 2022 exhibition at MoLI, ‘—Love, Says Bloom’, on the Joyce family, for #Ulysses100. She is editor-in-chief at flash e-zine Splonk.

Seaborne is another fine example of the historical novelist’s art, an admirable feat of imagination. O’Connor’s Anne has a fluid identity from the start… Anne emerges as not only a feminist and even a gender-fluid hero, but a hero to anyone for whom the dream of freedom remains.