FAQs

Is your writing autobiographical?

Every novelist gets asked this and it is very difficult to answer.  Certainly, despite what some readers seem to think when a story is narrated in the first person, I can say unequivocally – and with some relief! – that neither Jo Devereux (Lovers’ Hollow) nor Izzy Mulcahy (A Dance in Time) is me.

But yes, I share some experiences with them — brought up in small villages in rural Ireland, went to boarding school, lived in London…  Most significantly I suppose, my great-uncle was shot in the Irish Civil War, in an incident very like that described in in Lovers’ Hollow – though the reasons attributed in the book are entirely imagined.

While my experience of birth family, marriage, children, death and so on differs from my characters’, something of me is in them, and vice versa.

There’s a mystery and a (possible) murder in both of your books. Are you a crime fiction fan?
I read everything and anything if it’s well put together — including crime.  But when it comes to genre reading, my first love is historical fiction.

Why do you use a pen-name?
There are a number of reasons.  Firstly, people outside Ireland find my real name, Áine,  impossible to pronounce (it’s “awn-ya”, folks, not “ay-neh”) and my publishers agreed that a short, phonetic name that was easier for people to remember would be a good idea.

But there’s a bit more to it than that.  Every writer is engaged in a creative double-act.  There’s the you who (co)creates your writing and the you who (co)creates your life.  Having a pseudonym separates these out for me in a way that I find helpful.

Why Orna Ross?
I knew I wanted something easy to read and remember.  But what?  I spent ages toying around with names.  Then, one day as I shouting up the stairs, calling my two children down to eat – ‘Orna!  Ross!  Dinner’s ready!’ – I realised: the perfect name had delivered itself to me.  I asked them if they’d mind, they said fire ahead and Orna Ross was born.

Where do your ideas come from?
Every day I have oodles of ideas for articles, blogs and books that I know I’ll never write.  F-R-E-E-Writing and Inspiration Meditation just keep them coming.  Occasionally, things go into my novels that arise out of other writing that I’m doing — or vice versa. Most often, though, the ideas arise, as if from nowhere, when I’m lying in bed, telling myself I should get up, or when I’m jogging or walking, or in the bath….  But I’m there, ready and waiting, to capture them. Picasso said it best: “Inspiration does exist, but it has to find us working.”

Are you writing a novel at the moment?
My biggest project ever!  Again, it’s a family story of murder and mystery, three interlocking narratives set in 1863, 1968 and 2010 which explore money and war, sex and gender, family and race through the life of the super-dysfunctional, over-achieving MacIntyre family.  Once again, the historical story is told through a more contemporary lens.

The idea for this novel sparked during an evening course I took in American History while living in the north of England.  The story itself was shocking — of how a black man called Abraham Franklin was hung by an Irish mob. After Franklin was cut down, sixteen-year-old Patrick Butler dragged his corpse down the street by the testicles.  And all to cheers from the onlooking crowd of Irish men, women and children.

As powerful as the story itself was the tension in the classroom. The teacher and the, English students were all uncomfortable about my presence in the room — as if my being Irish in some way associated me with the actions of those far off people, in that distant time.

The novel tells of two families, one Irish, the other black, and plays out the myriad connections between them during this troubled time.  There is also a front story in a more contemporary setting — late 20th century New York City — where a baby, the newest addition to the McIntyre clan, has just died.  Officialdom labels it a cot death but each member of the family – father, mother, twin sister and brother – knows it wasn’t an accident.  Which one of them did it?  The answer is only revealed to the reader in the last paragraphs – and it is strangely connected to the atrocities that happened during that long-ago riot.