Although Danielle McLaughlin has published only one short story collection to date, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, and will this month publish her debut novel called The Art of Falling, her work reads like that of an old master.
Her details are perfectly plucked, her images crystalline. And there’s a sense that what she’s really saying is tucked between the lines. Whole worlds appear in words she hasn’t written.
When we meet over Zoom, I ask her: how does she do it? The answer, of course, is that McLaughlin doesn’t know.
“I think, possibly, my legal training and practice have something to do with it,” she says. “You study with attention to very small details, because so much can turn on [them].”
McLaughlin qualified as a lawyer in 1996, but was forced to stop practising at the age of 40 when a rare adverse reaction to prescribed medicine resulted in an autoimmune condition. “I was very sick for a while,” she says. “And I had quite limited movement because of a type of immune arthritis. But I’m fortunate because it went in the first year or two after I had the reaction, and has stayed away.”
Shortly after leaving the law, McLaughlin began to write. She took part in workshops and eventually set up her own writers’ group, which continues to this day. Since her first published story in 2011, she has gone from strength to strength, appearing in literary journals such as the Stinging Fly (who went on to publish Dinosaurs on Other Planets), and that elusive paragon for short story writers, the New Yorker.
In 2019, McLaughlin combined her passions for law and literature, editing the anthology Counterparts. In aid of the Peter McVerry Trust, it featured stories written by lawyers based on extracts from law reports. That same year, she won The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Windham Campbell Prize, two of the world’s most lucrative literary accolades.
Still, despite her success, the 52-year-old had “a kind of a wobble about being a writer” not too long ago.
Interview with Niamh Donnelly, Sunday Business Post – “Her details are perfectly plucked, her images crystalline”
Although Danielle McLaughlin has published only one short story collection to date, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, and will this month publish her debut novel called The Art of Falling, her work reads like that of an old master.
Her details are perfectly plucked, her images crystalline. And there’s a sense that what she’s really saying is tucked between the lines. Whole worlds appear in words she hasn’t written.
When we meet over Zoom, I ask her: how does she do it? The answer, of course, is that McLaughlin doesn’t know.
“I think, possibly, my legal training and practice have something to do with it,” she says. “You study with attention to very small details, because so much can turn on [them].”
McLaughlin qualified as a lawyer in 1996, but was forced to stop practising at the age of 40 when a rare adverse reaction to prescribed medicine resulted in an autoimmune condition. “I was very sick for a while,” she says. “And I had quite limited movement because of a type of immune arthritis. But I’m fortunate because it went in the first year or two after I had the reaction, and has stayed away.”
Shortly after leaving the law, McLaughlin began to write. She took part in workshops and eventually set up her own writers’ group, which continues to this day. Since her first published story in 2011, she has gone from strength to strength, appearing in literary journals such as the Stinging Fly (who went on to publish Dinosaurs on Other Planets), and that elusive paragon for short story writers, the New Yorker.
In 2019, McLaughlin combined her passions for law and literature, editing the anthology Counterparts. In aid of the Peter McVerry Trust, it featured stories written by lawyers based on extracts from law reports. That same year, she won The Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Windham Campbell Prize, two of the world’s most lucrative literary accolades.
Still, despite her success, the 52-year-old had “a kind of a wobble about being a writer” not too long ago.
Interview: Stephen Glennon, Connaught Tribune
One of Ireland’s best short-story writers, the award-winning Danielle McLaughlin, embarks on the next chapter of her career by launching her debut novel, The Art of Falling, online through the West Cork Literary Festival this Thursday evening.
Given the quality of Danielle’s work to date, which saw her win the Windham-Campbell Prize (€146,000) for her collection Dinosaurs on Other Planets and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story award for A Partial List of the Saved, the release of her first novel is keenly anticipated. The early indications from critics are that it doesn’t disappoint.
The central character of The Art of Falling is Nessa McCormack, whose marriage is on the mend following her husband’s affair. At work, she has taken charge of a retrospective art exhibition for an enigmatic sculptor, the late Robert Locke. Nessa appears to have attained an equilibrium of sorts in her life.
Read more of the Interview here
Interview: Colette Sheridan, Cork Echo
The couple and their daughter, Jennifer, live in a splendid house in Sunday’s Well, but all is not well. Family life has been marred by Philip’s infidelity, causing teenage Jennifer to misbehave and, oddly, to blame her mother for what has traumatised the household.
The bourgeois milieu that Danielle captures so astutely was chosen because it’s what she’s is familiar with.
Read the Interview in full here
Interview: Paul Nolan, Hot Press Magazine
A celebrated short story writer who has won both the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and the Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction, Danielle McLaughlin can expect further acclaim for her debut novel The Art Of Falling. It tells the compelling story of Cork-based gallery curator Nessa McCormack, who has to deal with the fallout when her husband has an affair with the mother of one of their teenage daughter’s school friends.
Further complicating matters, a woman is claiming she is the true creator of Nessa’s latest artistic project, a piece by deceased sculptor Robert Locke, and a past relationship has come back to haunt her. It’s a wonderful read, filled with wit and psychological insight, more than justifying the lofty expectations surrounding it.
Notably, one of the main themes of The Art Of Falling is how people negotiate long-term relationships, particularly as they approach middle age.
Read the Interview in full here
Cork writer on her heralded debut novel, self-doubt and writing with autism, Interview with Martin Doyle
Such was the brilliance of Danielle McLaughlin’s 2015 debut short story collection, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, that expectation levels for her first novel were extremely high. Its long gestation – the novel’s conception dates back to a writing workshop with Nuala O’Connor in 2012 – must have added to the anxiety.
We need not have feared. The Art of Falling is exceptional, and critics are already falling over themselves to praise it. The text has such depth, it could have been sent to a 3D printer.
The novel is firmly anchored in the author’s native county. Her protagonist Nessa’s description of the light by the sea in west Cork as not soft but “glorious, razor-sharp and unsparing” is a perfect description of McLaughlin’s own writing.
Read the interview in full here
Writer in Residence UCC
Delighted to speak to Liz Hession of Motley about the position of UCC Writer in Residence 2018-2019
Read the piece in full here: 
The New Yorker ¦ This Week in Fiction: Danielle McLaughlin
Irish Times ¦ Dissecting Danielle McLaughlin: the inside story of her writers’ group
Marie Gethins has been in a writers’ group with Danielle McLaughlin for four years. She reveals its methods and secrets: ‘a stellar combination of brutal honesty and kindness’
It began with worms.
In the spring of 2011 I joined Lory Manrique-Hyland’s writing workshop held at the Munster Literature Centre. Over the following weeks I was impressed by the standard and diversity of pieces we workshopped, but one stood out. It featured worms. Yes, dead ones, but live ones as well. Their lifecycle skilfully underscored the dynamics between human characters, made a betrayal story fresh. The author was Danielle McLaughlin.
Interview by Short Fiction
Danielle McLaughlin’s debut collection of short stories, Dinosaurs On Other Planets, was published in Ireland in 2015 by The Stinging Fly Press, in the UK in January 2016 by John Murray, and will be published in the US and Canada by Random House in August. She lives in County Cork with her husband and three young children.
Read MoreInterview by Marie Gethins
Danielle McLaughlin’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Irish Times, Southword, The Penny Dreadful, Long Story Short and The Stinging Fly and have also been broadcast on RTE Radio 1 and BBC Radio 4. Her debut collection of short stories, Dinosaurs on Other Planets, was published in Ireland by The Stinging Fly Press in 2015 and in the UK by John Murrays in January 2016. Random House will publish it in the US in August 2016.
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