I recently attended a Reading in Kilkeel Library by acclaimed local author Eoin McNamee. It was well worth the effort!
Pearl Gamble
Eoin is a very talented writer but he is also a humble and personable man. As a novelist, he has specialised in the genre often now dubbed faction – weaving a fictional plot around real events.
His novels include Ressurrection Man, which details the bloodletting of the Shankill Butchers : The Blue Tango which tells of the murder in the 50s of judge’s daughter Patricia Curran: and Orchid Blue , about the Pearl Gamble murder. I will shortly review the latter two here. He also wrote a novel of the last days of Princess Diana. Yet another novel is The Ultras.
Eoin now writes film scripts, the first being the script of the first novel mentioned above, released as a movie in 1998. He also scripted I Want You, a film by Michael Winterbottom.
He spoke to us freely about the differing demands of these varying roles.
Eoin is also a famous children’s and young person’s author: The Navigator Trilogy (The Navigator, City of Time and The Frost Child) and The Ring of Five (The Ring of Five, The Unknown Spy, Ghost Road) being examples. Under the pseudonym of John Creed he wrote a spy series, starring intelligence officer Jack Valentine (The Sirius Crossing, The Day of the Dead, Black Cat Black Dog).
Blue Tango was nominated for the Booker Prize. In 1990 Eoin was awarded The Macauley Fellowship for Irish Literature.
He has also been responsible for two novellas: The Last of Deeds and Love in History.
Eoin, from Kilkeel, now lives in Sligo with his wife and children.