Pat O'Shea (author)

Pat O'Shea (22 January 1931 – 3 May 2007) was an Irish children's fiction writer. She was born in Galway and was the youngest of five children. Her first novel was the best-selling The Hounds of the Morrigan, which took 13 years to complete. It was finally published in 1985 by Oxford University Press, translated into five languages, and is still considered a classic of children's literature.^[1]

Biography[]

O'Shea (née Patricia Mary Shiels) was born in the Bohermore area of Galway and attended and the . She was the youngest of five children. Her mother died when O'Shea was a small child, and she and the other children were brought up by her older sister.^[2][3]

At 16 she followed her siblings to England and decided to stay there, getting a job in a bookshop in Manchester. She began to write theatre plays and received a bursary in 1967 from the British Art Council.^[2][4][5]

Her writing for the theatre was supported by David Scase, director of the Library Theatre, Manchester, and his successor , and four of her one-act plays were produced by the Library Theatre. Her play The King's Ears was commissioned by BBC Northern Ireland. In 1971 she worked on a sketch comedy show for Granada Television called Flat Earth, but this was not successful.^{[4][5][2][3][6]}

In 1969 she had begun to write short stories and poetry, as well as a comic novel (unpublished). By the early 1970s she began writing The Hounds of the Morrigan to please herself and family and friends, with little expectation of getting it published.^[4] It took O'Shea ten years to complete her novel. By 1985, it had already been translated into several languages.^[7]

In poor health by the time of that novel's first sudden success, she completed only a few chapters of the unpublished sequel in the subsequent decades, although her obituary in The Guardian calls these "brilliant".^[4]

In 1988 O'Shea published a second children's book, Finn Mac Cool and the Small Men of Deeds, through the publisher Holiday. It was a retelling of folklore tales, illustrated by .^[8] In 1987 Horn Book Magazine included it in their annual list of notable children's books, giving it a Horn Book Fanfare Best books of the year award.^[9]

In 1999 she published her third (and final) book, The Magic Bottle (Scholastic). It was also illustrated by Lavis.^{[citation needed]}

She married JJ (Jack) O'Shea in 1953, but they separated in 1962. They had one son, Jim. Pat O'Shea died in Manchester in 2007, at age 76.^[4][5][2]

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