Claire Hennessy

The sun is shining (occasionally), the beer gardens are open, and language students and tourists alike are still bewildered by the idea of not getting their change back when paying their bus fare. Welcome to the Irish summer! Because we are…

“Star Trek is just a TV show!” “So was Brideshead Revisited!” “You’re angry, so I’m going to ignore that.” - Frasier (‘Star Mitzvah’) 26 years ago, a new Star Trek show, Deep Space Nine, launched, going where no Trek show had gone…

‘Both sides’. That’s what Jodi Picoult wants to show in her latest novel – her twenty-third, not counting co-written projects (two YA novels and a musical) or graphic novels (she’s written a Wonder Woman book as well, the prolific fiend!).…

This is deeply uncool, but then again I freely admit to being deeply uncool when it comes to music, so here goes. I first became obsessed with Queen because in the textbook we used for English in Transition Year – a slim volume that tried…

I’m a young adult writer, mostly. Which means that whenever anyone asks what I write, they get . . . this Look. (And a bit of a head tilt.) And then they ask, ‘have you ever thought about writing . . .  a real book?’ And then they might…

Kindly indulge me, and apologies to John Hughes here (except in relation to the icky bits of those movies; you know the ones I mean), but I firmly believe that the golden era of teen movies was 1995-2004. It was an age of retellings…

British author Matt Haig is delightfully unsnobbish about what he writes. His recent novels for adults have fallen into that space between ‘general fiction’ and ‘speculative fiction’, with The Humans and How To Stop Time featuring…

Maurice Swift (a name laden with literary significance) is a monster. We don’t know this at first, of course. We encounter him through the eyes of aged novelist Erich Ackermann in the late ‘80s, and see him as a struggling young writer –…

My Megan Abbott literary crush began a few years back, when she’d paused on reimagining noir tropes of the first part of the twentieth century and instead had delved into the realm of the contemporary, with a particular focus on the…

In late 2017, Cork-based New Binary Press issued an open call for submissions to a new anthology in aid of the fight – both at home and abroad – for women’s reproductive rights. Autonomy, to be edited by poet, workshop facilitator and…