Sheila Turner Johnston
As a student in Belfast during the Troubles, Sheila Turner Johnston was used to explosions. She went to investigate a huge bomb one night, and vividly remembers standing by the rubble of a three-storey building with its front ripped off. Lit by the arc lights of the army and rescue services high on the third floor, three coats still neatly hung on their hooks on the wall above the chasm below, remnants of an innocent evening that ended in death.
Sheila doesn't write explicitly about the Troubles, but the emotional resonance of this moment – and others like it – permeates all her writing. As she says herself, “Experiences like this force you to evaluate the human psyche, the judgements people make and how they justify, and often regret, their choices.”
She is an author who dives deeply into human emotions and relationships, exploring the grey areas between right and wrong and presenting her readers with moral and ethical dilemmas to navigate.
“People think loneliness is absence. It isn't. It's a filling up, a rising, spilling tide that crashes into every gully and chasm of your mind and soul until you're choked with emptiness, awash with desolation, thrashing in the foam of it, reaching for a hand to hold and yet finding no hand, no refuge, no comfort.”
“We are only moments away from the past. But it only takes a moment for everything to change, for the world to wobble on its axis and make the familiar strange.”