About Liz

Biography

Liz was born in Dublin in 1967.

Liz first began to write for broadcast in 2003. Between 2003 and 2013, she worked as a Story Associate on the popular television soap opera Fair City. She had several pieces accepted for Sunday Miscellany, a radio series on RTE Radio 1 specialising in nostalgic autobiographical writing.

Subsequently, she had two children’s stories accepted by the Fiction 15 series for the same broadcaster.

In 2006, her first short story for adults, Alice, was shortlisted for the Francis McManus Short Story Prize.

Liz went on to write a children’s animation series called The Resistors for TG4. Her half-hour drama, The Appointment was one of four winners chosen to be broadcast live on TG4 in the Seomra Sé series.

Liz’s radio drama, Appearances, represented Ireland at the New York Festivals in 2008.

She was the winner of an EATC bursary and writing workshops in Geneva and Berlin for pilot episode of drama series Campus in 2007.

Liz’s first novel Unravelling Oliver was published to critical and popular acclaim in Ireland in March 2014. It quickly became a firm favourite with book clubs and reader’s groups. In November of that year, it went on to win the Crime Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and was long listed for the International Dublin Literature Prize 2016. She was also the winner of the inaugural Jack Harte Bursary provided by the Irish Writers Centre and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Dec 2014.

Her second novel, Lying in Wait, was released in July 2016. It went straight to number 1 in the Irish Bestseller lists, remaining there for nine weeks and spent eight months in the top ten.

In September 2016, Liz was awarded the Ireland Funds Monaco bursary and went to Monaco for a month to write in the Princess Grace Irish library.

In November 2016, Lying in Wait won the RTE Ryan Tubridy Show Listener’s Choice Award at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards. The book was also shortlisted in the Crime Fiction category. It has been long listed for the Dublin International Literary Award 2018.

Lying in Wait was chosen as part of the Spring 2017 list for the very prestigious Richard & Judy Book Club in the UK and in April 2017, it was the winner of the Reader’s Choice Award of the Richard & Judy Spring List.

Scout Press, an imprint of Simon & Schuster USA published Unraveling Oliver in 2017, Lying in Wait in 2018, Little Cruelties in 2020 and Strange Sally Diamond in 2023. She is very pleased to be in the editorial hands of Aimee Bell in New York and Nita Pronovost in Toronto. Unraveling Oliver was chosen for the BEA Book Buzz panel at Book Expo in June 2017 and Lying in Wait topped the Canadian charts in January 2019.

Liz was honoured to win the Irish Tatler Woman of the Year award in Literature in October 2017.

Her third novel, Skin Deep was published by Penguin books in the UK and Ireland in Spring 2018. In November that year, it won two awards: Crime Novel of the Year, and RTE Radio Listener’s Choice Award at the Irish Book Awards. It subsequently won a Dead Good Award for The Book You Can’t Put Down at Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Writing Festival at Harrogate, Yorkshire in July 2019.

In March 2020, just as the country went into lockdown after the pandemic of Covid 19 hit Ireland, Our Little Cruelties was published in Ireland. Nevertheless, it retained the number one spot for 12 weeks and remained in the top ten for five months. 

It was published in the UK in paperback in January 2021, and in the USA and Canada under the title ‘LITTLE CRUELTIES’ in November 2020. The New York Times named Little Cruelties as one of just seven ‘MOST RECOMMENDED THRILLERS OF 2020’.

In February 2021 Liz was honoured to accept the James Joyce Medal from the L&H Society of University College Dublin. Previous recipients include Bill Clinton, Seamus Heaney, JK Rowling and Sue Townsend.

Liz’s “wickedly dark, twisted and brilliantly observed” fifth novel, Strange Sally Diamond, was published in the UK & Ireland by Penguin Sandycove in March 2023. It went straight to number one in Ireland and won “Crime Novel of the Year” at the ‘An Post’ Irish Book Awards in November 2023. It was published in Canada & the US in July 2023.

Also in 2023, Liz was awarded Writer of the Year at the Goss.ie Women of the Year awards.

In 2024, Strange Sally Diamond was named ‘Book of the Moment’ by WH Smiths in the UK and ‘Thriller of the Month’ by Waterstones.

Aside from writing, Liz has led workshops in writing drama for broadcast in Ireland and New Zealand. She has also produced and managed literary salons, interviewed many other writers, including Joseph O’Connor, Sinead Crowley, Graham Norton, Jane Casey, Marian Keyes, Val McDermid, Ian Rankin and Jane Harper.