Bio
Like most writers I didn’t take the direct route into publishing, I gained an Honours Degree in English Literature and Psychology from Dublin City University and a Postgraduate Degree from University College, Galway. I have worked in all sorts of jobs, as a fashion model, an event’s organizer and in the intellectual disability and mental health sector. The constant throughout has been a love of books! I have read and written all of my life.
For many years, I wrote scraps of poems, just joined up lines of thought, that conveyed life as I saw it. My ‘everyday poetry’ was written in waiting rooms, on serviettes, left over note books and sometimes stuffed into the back of my wallet! When I began to write longer fiction, the experience was very different, sometimes the thread would come from overheard words or a notion of ‘what if…’ For the novels, I needed quiet, time and a little planning and structure. My first attempt was a ramble of long narrative that brought me along for eighty thousand words and left me feeling incredibly fulfilled. I could do it. I could actually write a novel. Since then, the ambition has been to write a novel that I’m happy with and that is going to appeal to a wide audience – that’s a tightrope order, but with My Husbands Wives, it seems I managed it.
I was a winner in the 2014 Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair – an international competition for emerging writers, the feedback was very positive and complimentary and suddenly, there were possibilities beyond just scribbling a few lines here and a few lines there.
In 2018 I was selected as a Words Ireland winner in the DWAD afternoon – this opened up opportunities among writers and film directors and it was an honor to be one of the final winners.
In 2019 I was honored and delighted to win Mayo Business Woman of the Year (Arts) in the Network Ireland Business Woman of the Year Awards.
My contemporary fiction novels have achieved top ten best seller status across the US, UK, Australia and Canada. My Husbands Wives was a top ten bestseller in Ireland on its trade paper back release. The Ladies Midnight Swimming Club – reached the overall No 1 position in the Amazon UK charts and has spent weeks sitting pretty in the top overall books sold and read on Amazon. Its available in e-book and in all good bookshops. All of my novels can be found in large print and audio formats also. You can order most formats through your local library.
There have been many highs along the way, when the books featured as Book Club Favorites, Net Galley Hot Reads and Summer Must Reads. Being chosen as a summer must read never gets old!
I also write crime fiction novels under the name Geraldine Hogan. My Corbally series, set in Limerick is available to read on Amazon.
I am a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines and short story compilations.
I am currently working on edits and an idea for a new contemporary fiction novel. I live in the west of Ireland with my husband – Mr H, four children and a very busy chocolate Labrador called Penny.
