Louise O’Neill at the Ulster Hall in Belfast
CO CORK writer Louise O’Neill has had an eventful couple of years, from moving in with her parents aged 26 and starting to write a novel in her pyjamas to having a party on a yacht in the US with stars including actress Eva Longoria.
As she told her Belfast readers at a `literary lunchtime’ reading in the Ulster Hall yesterday, the party in question was to celebrate her selling the film rights to her best-selling first novel Only Ever Yours.
She says there are also plans for a TV `prequel’ series and a Broadway musical based on the `young adult fiction’ book, praised by one high-profile publisher as being the best dystopian novel since Hunger Games but too bleak for their taste.
That knock-back didn’t stop O’Neill’s progress, who explained how her life had “completely changed” in the past 18 months.
“For my 27th birthday, my parents got me a laptop. I didn’t go out or drink or date – my favourite things to do – for months. So I was watching One Direction videos and then wrote the book in my pyjamas in my parents’ house. It wasn’t so glamorous.”
The Clonakilty writer was reading yesterday from her second novel, Asking For It, which revolves around a horrific rape case in a rural Irish town. It was voted Children’s Book of the Year (Senior) at the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards last month.
The film version of Only Ever Yours is scheduled to go into production next year, according to O’Neill, who also revealed that Lady Gaga was a huge fan of the book.
