Felicity Hayes-McCoy

Felicity Hayes-McCoy graduated in English and Irish from University College Dublin in the 1970s. She then built a successful UK-based career as an actress and writer, working in theatre, music theatre, radio, tv, and digital media, and married her husband,English opera director, Wilf Judd.Her memoir, The House on an Irish Hillside - described as 'wise, funny' and 'blazingly beautiful' by the actress Joanna Lumley - explores the lifelong journey which has reconnected Felicity with her native cultural inheritance and led her and Wilf to divide their time between a former Edwardian factory in inner-city London and a stone house on Ireland's Dingle peninsula, where Felicity first studied the Irish language in her teens. It was published by Hodder & Stoughton UK in 2012. In response to requests from her readers, Enough Is Plenty: The Year on the Dingle Peninsula, a sequel to The House on an Irish Hillside, was published by The Collins Press in 2015. Illustrated with photographs taken by herself and her husband, and with a foreword by the best-selling Irish writer Alice Taylor, it charts the cycle of the Celtic year in her own house and garden.Her second memoir, A Woven Silence: Memory, History & Remembrance, described by The Sunday Times as 'a powerful piece of personal and political history', was published in September 2015, also by The Collins Press. Inspired by the lost story of her grandmother's cousin Marion Stokes, one of three women who raised the tricolour over Enniscorthy town in Wexford during Ireland's 1916 Rising, it explores the consequences for individuals, families, communities and nations when memories are erased, intentionally or by chance. The Library at the Edge of The World, The first of two novels commissioned by Hachette Irl, will be published in June 2016.