Martine McDonagh used to work in the music industry, managing artists including James and Fujiya & Miyagi. More recently she devised and ran the MA Creative Writing and Publishing at West Dean College in Sussex.
Her first novel, I Have Waited, and You Have Come (Myriad, 2012) was described as ‘cataclysmically brilliant’ by author Elizabeth Haynes, and praised in the Guardian and Red.
Her most recent novel, Narcissism for Beginners was longlisted for the 2017 Not The Booker Prize and is shortlisted for the 2018 People’s Book Prize. It is published in Germany as Familie und andere Trostpreis. She has also published short fiction and journalism. She has lived in Bristol, Manchester, London and Brighton and now lives in West Yorkshire.
Martine McDonagh is also a contributor to The Brighton Book, a mixed-media anthology published by Myriad in association with Brighton Festival.
Interviews and Features
In conversation with Matt Dwyer
Listen here to a podcast featuring Martine in conversation with American comedian, actor and writer Matt Dwyer, as they disucss the music industry, our declining environment and how Margaret Thatcher started the privatization of England’s social programmes.
Interview with Brighton Writers Retreat
‘I’m not someone who does housework to put off writing, I write to avoid housework. I only procrastinate when I’m getting ready to begin a long phase of work…’
Read Martine’s interview with Brighton Writer’s Retreat and find out about what she thinks about her ‘Inner critic’.
Interview with Post Apocalyptic Book Club
‘The idea to set the novel in a climate-changed world was the end result of much thought about how the future might look. The conclusion I drew was that life in the mid-to-late 21st Century would probably look more like the historical past than the fictional future as envisaged by Hollywood…’
Martine discusses genre and talks setting her debut novel in a dysotpian world, in an interview with the Post Apocalyptic Book Club.
Interview with The Second Best Time
‘My first novel, I Have Waited, and You Have Come, is dystopian anti-chicklit – a stalker story with an unreliable narrator set in a climate-changed future, so might suit people who like creepy female characters and being scared…’
Discover Martine’s views on the differences between male and female writers, and why we need the Women’s Prize for Literature, in Stephen May’s interview with Martine for The Second Best Time blog.