Pat O'Shea

Pat O'Shea (born January 22, 1931 in Bohermore , County Galway , † May 3, 2007 in Manchester ) was an Irish children's author .

Life

Pat O'Shea, real name Patricia Mary Shiels, was born in West Ireland in 1931 as the youngest of five children. Since her mother Bridget died when she was a small child, she was raised by her eldest sister Teresa, who also had to look after her older father. As a child, Pat wrote small plays and performed them with relatives and friends in an old shed. She attended Presentation National School and the Convent of Mercy Secondary School . Attending secondary school was not a matter of course for young girls in western Ireland in the 1940s.

At the age of 16 she followed her relatives, who had all emigrated to England . In Manchester, she started working as a bookseller in a bookshop. She began writing plays for theater and television again, and met her future husband, Jack O'Shea, whom she married in 1953. The marriage produced a son. The spouses separated by mutual agreement in 1962.

Pat O'Shea later worked on the theater with the assistance of David Scase, director of the Library Theater in Manchester, and received a grant from the British Art Council in 1967. With this support, she was able to perform four one-act plays written by her in the theater and her play The King's Ears was produced by the BBC Northern Ireland.

In 1969 she began writing short stories, poetry and a graphic novel . In the early 1970s she began writing a larger story titled The Hounds of the Morrigan , which was primarily intended for the entertainment of family and friends. The fairy tale-like plot takes place in the west of Ireland when she was a child and interweaves the genres of adventure and Irish-Celtic fairy tales and mythology. After more than 10 years of work on the manuscript, The Hounds of the Morrigan was published as a children's book of the same name in 1985 by Oxford University Press and received consistently positive reviews. O'Shea's debut work has been compared to The Chronicles of Narnia by CS Lewis , Alan Garner's The Magic Stone of Brisingamen, and even Tolkien's Lord of the Rings , and sparked a renewed interest in Irish folklore. The book has been translated into several languages, including German, French, Italian and Spanish. A few chapters of a subsequent novel already existed, but despite encouraging words from her reviewers, Pat O'Shea did not finish the work.

Pat O'Shea only published two shorter stories after her successful debut: Finn Mac Cool and the Small Men of Deeds , a retelling of Irish fairy tales, and The Magic Bottle . Under the title Die Mórrígan Pack , the book was produced by SWR together with NDR in 2001 as a fantasy radio play and in December 2001 it was named Radio Play of the Month .

With the proceeds from her first book, Pat O'Shea bought a house near Tuam , County Galway. There she spent the summer months until the end of her life. O'Shea lived with her partner in Chorlton, a borough of Manchester, until her death. She died there in 2007 after a long illness.

Works

title	Publication date	publishing company	ISBN	comment
The Hounds of the Morrigan	1985	Oxford University Press	0-06-447205-1	Translated: De, Fr, It, Es
Finn Mac Cool and the Small Men of Deeds	1988	Holiday	0823406512	Illustrations by Stephen Lavis
The Magic Bottle	1999	Scholastic	059011350X	Illustrations by Stephen Lavis

Awards

• The Mórrígan Pack - Radio Play of the Month December 2001

Web links

• Writer who created a novel for children to marvel: Pat O'Shea - Irish Times , May 19, 2007 (English)
• Pat O'Shea - Author of the best-selling The Hounds of the Morrigan - Obituary in The Guardian , June 23, 2007 (English)