This website charts a journey which began in Finglas in the mid-1970s when my sister Deirdre typed my teenage poems during her lunch break; my sister June became my first audience when I babysat her children and my brother acquired my first typewriter in ways still not covered by the statute of limitations. That battered typewriter now resides in the Little Museum of Dublin but has been swept for fingerprints.

In 1977 my brother-in-law played football with a lad who operated a small letterpress printing machine in his shed. He printed four hundred copies of a tiny pamphlet of my early poems. It sold out by word of mouth in local factories and shops. I don’t list it in bibliographies as I doubt if any copies made it beyond Finglas. But almost by accident, I became not just a poet but a publisher as well.

It was the start of a journey that took me from factory hand to library assistant to small press publisher until I began to make a precarious living with just the thin sliver of my imagination over thirty-five years ago. The journey never made my fortune but has allowed me to meet extraordinary people – writers and actors sadly no longer with us and readers with whom I’ve forged life-long friendships.

I’ve learnt that writing is a marathon and not a sprint, as shown by how my latest novel, An Ark of Light, took thirteen years to write. Prevarication is the writer’s enemy and perseverance their strength. If anyone has stumbled upon this page while enduring the setbacks involved in writing a first novel, then I hope that you persevere to complete it. You will need to overcome self-doubt to write a first draft with passion in your heart and then – when you see it come alive on the page – to write the second draft with ice in your veins. Not every novel gets published and not every published book enjoys acclaim. I speak as someone who has enjoyed some success but who also once saw a play of mine cancelled because a touring production of Peppa Pig became available. If you complete the journey of exploration involved in writing a first novel, then whether or not that particular one is published, you will have proven something to yourself: an achievement that can never be taken away. I wish you every success.

I offer sincere thanks to the readers of my novels who have been willing to embark with me on imaginative journeys over the years. My thanks also to the actors, amateur and professional, who allow the phantoms of my imagination to live again every time they take the risk of stepping onto a lit stage. The theatre needs playwrights, but it needs actors, directors, set designers, lighting designers and backstage crew just as much. Salutations to you all and thank you visiting this site.

Dermot Bolger