Bernie Mcgill
Bernie McGill lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland. She is the author of two novels: The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch House, which was shortlisted in 2019 for the Irish/European Union Prize for Literature. Her work has been translated into Dutch (Charlotte’s vleugels) and into Italian (La donna che collezionava farfalle and Le parole nell’aria).
Her latest publication is This Train is For, a collection of short stories published by No Alibis Press, Belfast (June 2022). Sleepwalkers, Bernie's first collection of short stories, was published in May 2013 by Whittrick Press and shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize 2014. The title story was first prizewinner in the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Contest (US) and the collection includes 'Home', a supplementary prizewinner in the 2010 Bridport Short Story Prize and 'No Angel', Second Prizewinner in the Seán Ó Faoláin and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Prizes. Her work has been anthologised in Belfast Stories, Reading the Future and in the award-winning The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore, and in Female Lines. She is the recipient of a number of Arts Council Awards as well as a Research Award from the Society of Authors. She is a former Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's University, Belfast.
Reviews
‘McGill writes about life, love and telegraphy with a poet’s clarity’ Sunday Times
‘Totally absorbing and full of unexpected twists’ Sunday Business Post
‘A lyrical, wonderfully atmospheric novel’ Sunday Express
‘McGill proves once again she is a masterful storyteller . . . historical fiction at its absolute best’ The Lady
‘The Watch House, set on Rathlin Island at the turn of the 20th century, [is] awash in old rituals and impending transformations, in loyalties and enmities and all manner of local witchery.’ Patricia Craig in the Irish Times Books of the Year.
‘Hard to put down, this atmospheric book will stay with you long after the final heart-rending denouement, setting McGill firmly into the panoply of modern Irish writers’ Irish Independent
'McGill has the ability to enter into the brain and heart of her characters.' (Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey writing in The Guardian
“But I'm getting to it. I can't come at it cold. I'm warming my hands over old stories.”
“This is not my prison. I carry it with me. We devise cages of our own choosing.”
“Life is fluid. We are the ghosts of all the people we might become, peering forward to catch a glimpse of what could be, our future selves staring back at us, at who we might have been, never were.”
“You'll have to make do with the story instead, pieced together from the scraps of old lives. That is all I have.”
“You see only what is before your eyes and not what is behind the eyes of others.”
“That's what we do: tell made-up stories to fend off the night, to put off telling the truth.”
“Some ghosts are so quiet you would hardly know they were there.”