About the Author

Meet Felicity Hayes-McCoy

I’ve been a professional writer all my working life and a reader for longer than I can remember. Along the way, my projects have included nonfiction titles; children’s books; original TV dramas and contributions to series (including Ballykissangel, the BBC’s smash-hit series, set in Ireland); radio soap opera, features, documentaries, and plays; screenplays; a couple of opera libretti; and interactive multimedia. But—given that my childhood was spent largely behind sofas, reading stories—I suspect it was inevitable that, sooner or later, I’d come to write a series of books about books, with a protagonist who’s a librarian.

I was born in Dublin, Ireland, studied English and Irish language and literature at university, and emigrated to London in my early twenties. I built a successful career there, as an actress and then as a writer: in fact, it was books that led me to the stage in the first place, the wonderful Blue Door Theatre series by the English children’s author Pamela Brown. Back in the 1960s Dublin was famous for its musty, quirky secondhand bookshops beside the River Liffey My father, who was a historian, was unable to pass the stalls that stood outside them without stopping and never came home without a book or two, for himself or one of the family. I still have the Nelson edition of The Swish of the Curtain that he bought me in 1963, with the price and the date penciled inside in his careful, elegant handwriting. It cost him ninepence, which I’m not sure he’d have spent so cheerfully if he’d known that his gift was going to make me an actress, not an academic. Still, I like to think he’d have been pleased to know that, thirty years later, as a writer in London, I successfully pitched and dramatized the Blue Door Theatre series for BBC Radio.

To a certain extent, my Finfarran Peninsula series has a little of my own story in it. Though Hanna Casey’s is a rural background, like me she grew up in Ireland and moved to London where she married. In 1986, I met and married the English opera director Wilf Judd, then artistic director of the Garden Venture at London’s Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. Unlike Hanna and her rat-fink husband Malcolm, though, Wilf and I met as colleagues, and we continue to work together, sharing our love of literature, theatre, ecology, and design, and dividing our life and work between a flat in inner-city London and a stone house at the western end of Ireland’s Dingle Peninsula.

In my memoir The House on an Irish Hillside I write about our Irish home on this real peninsula which, while geographically similar, is culturally quite different from my fictional Finfarran. One of the defining differences is that our West Kerry home is in what is called a Gaeltacht—an area where Irish, not English, is the language of everyday life. Gaeltacht, pronounced “Gwale-tockt,” comes from the word Gaeilge, which is often translated into English as “Gaelic.” And “Gaelic,” incidentally, is not a word ever used in Ireland for the Irish language!

I first visited the western end of the Dingle Peninsula at age seventeen, not just to further my Irish language studies but because of a growing fascination with folklore. I was seeking something I’d glimpsed in my childhood in Dublin, a city kid curled on my country granny’s bed listening to stories. I’d begun to understand it as a student, ploughing through books and exams. And, on that first visit, I began to recognize something that, all my life, I’d taken for granted. The effect of thinking in two languages.

Since then, partly through writing The Library at the Edge of the World, I’ve come to realize more deeply that my earliest experience of storytelling came from my grandmother’s Irish-language oral tradition; and that memories of that inheritance, married to my love of Ireland’s English-language literary tradition, have shaped me as a writer.

When Wilf and I first decided to divide our life between two countries, we weren’t escaping from an English city to a rural Irish idyll. Life can be stressful anywhere in the world, and human nature is universal. So, for us, living in two places isn’t about running from one and escaping to the other. It’s about heightening our awareness and appreciation of both.

There’s a story about the legendary Irish hero Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his warriors hunting the hills of Ireland. They chase the deer from dawn to dusk and then gather to eat, drink, and make music. As they sit by the fire, between tunes and talk, Fionn puts a question to his companions: “What is the best music in the world?” One man says it’s the cry of the cuckoo. Another says it’s the ring of a spear on a shield. Someone suggests the baying of a pack of deerhounds, or the laughter of a willing girl. “Nothing wrong with any of them,” says Fionn, “but there’s better music.” So they ask him what it is and he gives them his answer. “The best music in the world,” he says, “is the music of what happens.”

Each time life and work take me from Ireland to London and back again, there’s a brief window—maybe just on the journey from the airport—when everything I see and hear becomes heightened. For an author, that’s gold dust. Focus sharpens, bringing with it a new sense of what it is to be alive. As my brain shifts from one language to another, I discover new word patterns, and reappraise those that are familiar. The contrasting rhythms of the two places provide endless entrance points for creativity; and, for me, the universality of human experience, seen against different backgrounds, has always been the music of what happens.

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