Sheila is an author, playwright, creative writing tutor and a heritage expert in schools.
Sheila Forsey
Irish Times Best Selling Author
Sheila was born on a farm on the south east coast of Ireland and was brought up listening to the legends and folklore of Ireland’s past. This gave her a love of words that became the stepping- stone for her career in writing. An intriguing interest into Ireland’s complex and at times very difficult past led her to write historical fiction. With a love for the theatre and many years treading the boards she turned her love of being on the stage to writing for the stage. She is a Trinity College Dublin postgraduate in Creative and Cultural studies and a graduate of NUI Maynooth in Creative Writing. She spent two years as a curator for Wexford Literary Festival and is the facilitator for creative writing in adult education. She has received a bursary in Literature from Artlinks and was a finalist in Scripts Ireland with a new piece of theatre.
As a child growing up she tended to spend a lot of her time walking through fields and on the coast with her Jack Russell. It was here that her imagination took off and she began inventing stories. When she was not found wondering through nature she spent hours reading everything that Enid Blyton had ever written progressing then to The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. This early immersion into nature and the beauty and wildness of Ireland’s landscape mixed with a passion for mystery stories are very present in her writing today.
‘The Ireland of my childhood was filled with stories. Not from a book but from memory, passed from generation to generation. These stories fuelled my imagination and gave me a cornucopia of memories to carry with me that now inform my words. Ireland’s windswept coastline, rugged mountains, valleys and ever-changing sky can be wild and haunting and filled with the voices of the past.’
