THURSDAY TRAILBLAZER: Maeve Binchy

Since picking up a battered copy of Light a Penny Candle as a teenager, I have been a huge fan of Maeve Binchy. I don't know if it was the gentle way in which she wrote, the fascinating characters or just her ability to write a gripping story that had me hooked, but it wasn't until I started to research her for this post that I realised how phenomenally successful Maeve is.

Described in the Irish Independent as "the mammy of all the best selling chick lit writers", Maeve was 43 when her first novel Light a Penny Candle was published in 1983. Born in Dublin in 1940, she worked as a teacher, then travelled to Israel to work on a kibbutz. Whilst out there she frequently wrote home and it was one of these letters that her Dad managed to sell to the Irish Times. She went on to become an extremely popular columnist for them.

After moving to London to be a journalist, she had several short story collections published including Central Line and Victoria Line. Then in 1983 her hard work (she started writing at 5am in the morning before going on to her full time job) paid off. She sold her first novel for a reported £52,000, the biggest sum at the time for a first time novel.

Maeve has sold around £50m books in nearly 40 countries. An amazing figure. She writes about her own experiences of time and place with her writing style alternating between the story of one woman, a pair of friends or a group of interlocking stories. Her main characters are predominantly female and deal with the changing problems of Irish women.

In 1995 Circle of Friends was made into a film with Minnie Driver and Chris O'Donnell. In 1999, Tara Road was picked up by Oprah's Book Club. Her secret to success? She writes as if she is talking. She insists she doesn't have a style but just chats away on the page.

Bibliography

Along with her numerous short stories the following novels have been published:

Light a Penny Candle

The Lilac Bus

Echoes

Firefly Summer

Silver Wedding

Circle of Friends

The Copper Beach

Glass Lake

Evening Class

Tara Road

Scarlet Feather

Quentins

Nights of Rain and Stars

Whitethorn Woods

The Maeve Binchy Writer's Club (not a novel but an excellent book on writing)

Related posts: Thursday Trailblazer archives

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