Seamus McKenna
A voracious reader, Seamus early on developed the urge to write. He spent several years practicing as a Civil Engineer, all the while composing his prose and perfecting his technique, and being published in newspapers and magazines.
In time, he gained an MBA from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and combined that with his engineering qualification to operate as a business analyst with a number of multi-national companies, including Shell Oil, based overseas.
In the early 2000s he came back to Ireland to participate in the so-called Celtic Tiger, where his professional experience and writing skills allowed him to submit the most sublime proposals to financial institutions so that he could take part in property development. Rapid growth and an ever more elevated lifestyle followed, right up to the onset of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, when everything collapsed. He spent the next ten years in intense legal battles with the aim of holding on to his home. He also published his first book, a best-selling treatment of algorithmic Foreign Exchange trading, called The Omicron Forex Trading Manual (2012).
In 2023 he obtained an MA in Creative Writing from Dublin City University (DCU).
He has broadcast on RTE (Irish national broadcaster) Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany (new writing for radio).
Now he has downsized, in all respects, and, while no longer living the high life, is comfortable. This means he can devote all his time to his first and only love, which is writing, both in fiction and non-fiction.
His well-received first novel was THE MAKER’S NAME, a literary thriller. His book based on his letters in The Irish Times over many years, THE RECONSTITUTION OF IRELAND, is built around reproductions of the letters from The Irish Times archive, with historical commentary and memoir.
He’s been a reader from an early age when his uncle Mick, a Christian Brother teaching monk, sent him Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, The Coral Island by R. M. Ballantyne, and The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. While those books sowed the seed for a life-long and profound love of the written word (he re-reads Treasure Island every so often), he quickly graduated to more mature fare — Fear of Flying (Erica Jong), Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Robert M. Pirsig), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Robinson (Muriel Spark), Breakfast at Tiffany’s and In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, practically everything by Graham Greene, John McGahern’s major works, Schindler’s Ark, by Thomas Keneally, The Feast (Margaret Kennedy), White Tiger (Aravind Adiga), Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov), London Fields and others by Martin Amis, Brideshead Revisited (Evelyn Waugh), and The Catcher in the Rye (JD Salinger), made lasting impressions. So did everything that was written by James Joyce, but in particular Ulysses and The Dead, from Dubliners.
Contemporary books he has loved and taken inspiration from include The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson (English translation by Reg Keeland 2008), Piranesi (2021) by Susanna Clarke, Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy (2019, 2021, 2024), Venetian Vespers (2025) by John Banville, The Bee Sting (2023) by Paul Murray, and The Sense of an Ending (2011), by Julian Barnes.
