Christina McKenna

Christina McKenna grew up near the village of Draperstown, Co Derry, Northern Ireland. She trained as an artist before becoming a full-time author.

Her first book, the memoir "My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress", was published to great critical acclaim in 2004. It was described as a "redemptive postscript to over a decade of Irish childhood memoirs, concluding that our past, no matter how painful, need not keep us bound."

It was followed by two non-fiction titles dealing with the paranormal: "The Dark Sacrament" and "Ireland's Haunted Women".

Her first novel, "The Misremembered Man," published in the United States in 2008, is a tragi-comedy set in the fictional village of Tailorstown. Christina's original screenplay of the novel is currently in development.

These days she is adapting for television several of the cases from "The Dark Sacrament" with husband and co-author David M Kiely. She is also hard at work on the sequel to "The Misremembered Man", to be entitled "The Unrepentant Woman."

Praise for "My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress".

"There have been many books recalling Irish childhoods published over the last few years, but this one stands out among the rest for the brilliance of the writing".

Irish Emigrant

"Lyrical and elegiac but never sentimental . . . "

Waterstones

"Beautifully told . . . interspersed with lines from Larkin, MacNeice, Goldsmith and Heaney. This is an eloquent rite-of-passage account of two generations of Irish women".

Belfast Telegraph