Phoenix Convention

Born in the USA Maura was transplanted early to the West of Ireland where she bloomed into a reader of sf, fantasy, and horror literature after a visiting cousin left behind a copy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. On occasion her parents voiced concerns about Maura's weird reading material, but she turned out all right in the end.

Over the years she has obtained a B.A. in English and History, a M.A. in English (a research thesis on 19th century Anglo-Irish supernatural fiction), completed a short course on filmmaking, a Diploma in Film Studies, and a M.A. in Screenwriting. For four years she helped run Octocon, the Irish national sf convention, and it imprinted on her a love of conventions and meeting people with similar passions. She ignored her abiding interest in writing for a number of years when she was lured into a career in IT, but eventually she could no longer ignore the clamour of characters and stories in her head.

In 2006 she was delighted to be accepted into the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle: a six-week residential course that selects 18 writers from an international field to train them to be professional writers of sf/fantasy/horror. She was the recipient of the Gordon R Dickson scholarship for that year, and was the first Irish writer to attend Clarion West.

She lives in the West of Ireland with her husband Martin, and works part-time for the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild as a webmaster, newsletter editor, and blogger.

Maura writes as much as possible, and her short stories and poetry have been published in markets such as the Fantasy Magazine anthology, the Jabberwocky 3 anthology, Shroud Magazine, Aoife's Kiss, Black Static, Arkham Tales, Doorways Magazine, Paradox Magazine and M-Brane SF with more forthcoming from All Hallows and Goblin Fruit. Her short story, "Bone Mother", was podcast last year on Pseudopod (http://pseudopod.org/2009/02/06/pseudopod-128-bone-mother/), and her story "The Tamga" is available as podcast at http://pseudopod.org/2010/01/22/pseudopod-178-the-tamga/ . Her screenplay "Hotel Training" was shot as a short film in 2009, as part of the Darklight Film Festival. She's working on a graphic novel called Róisín Dubh with Rob Curley and Stephen Daly, which is due out in 2010 from Atomic Diner.