Rebecca was awarded the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize by
Poetry Review in 2003, and her debut pamphlet
Poems was published by the Wordsworth Trust, where she was a writer in residence in 2005. Her debut poetry
collection
We’
ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the
Irish Times Shine Strong Award. More recently, her work was longlisted for the National Poetry
Competition and shortlisted for the Montreal International Poetry
Prize. Her work has been published in the
Guardian, the
Irish
Times,
Poetry Ireland,
Poetry Review,
The
Spectator,
The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. She lives
in rural Ireland, where she is co-founder and director of
The
Moth. Her debut novel,
He Is Mine and I Have No Other,
was
published by Canongate in 2018.
Praise for He Is Mine and I Have No Other
‘My heart broke a little bit for
Lani and Leon. He Is Mine and I Have No Other vividly calls up
the atmosphere of small-town life. Eerie, tender and wonderful.’ Sophie
Mackintosh
‘Vivid, authentic and compelling … may be the truest depiction of Irish rural
girlhood since Edna O’Brien’s Girl With Green Eyes. What a treat it
is to be introduced to such a genuine, compassionately humorous and profoundly
tender voice’ Pat McCabe
‘Powerful and searing ...
O’Connor captures the dread and anticipation attendant on these teenage rites
with great skill and sensitivity ... writes with genuine grace and
fluency’ Sunday Times
‘I adored He is Mine and I Have No Other . . . Amazing,
heartbreaking, brilliantly done.’ Donal Ryan
‘Rebecca O'Connor captures vividly the small triumphs and catastrophes of
being a teenage girl in rural Ireland, but in the further darkness to which she
reaches is a truth for all generations.’ Belinda McKeon
‘This tender and poignant novel set in a small town in Ireland in the 1990s
is a slim, literary wonder.’ Cass Moriarty
‘God, this book is brilliant.
Vivid and utterly compelling, this book had me torn between racing on and
stopping to marvel at beautifully crafted lines,’ Jess Kidd
‘A haunting novel that cuts
right into the delicate and dangerous world of the adolescent. Sometimes
frightening, often funny, but never a word less than a true work of art.’ Christine
Dwyer Hickey
‘This is a work of slim elegant
beauty. A poetic meditation on love and desire, with a truly astonishing
conclusion. I loved reading it. With this novel Rebecca O’Connor has arrived
fully mature, as an extraordinary storyteller who will delight the reader.’ Michael
Harding
‘Captures, with uncanny precision, the sheer ferociousness of teenage desire .
. . An evocative, atmospheric and thought-provoking read’ Sunday
Independent
‘A heady dive into the
vulnerability, passion and recklessness of youth, with an eye for wry detail,
and it luminously evokes the delicacy of teen romance ... a vivid and sensitive
first novel, exploring growing pains through the prism of social change.’ Sydney
Morning Herald
‘A remarkable account of adolescent love in the 1990s, backlit by the true
story of 35 children who burned to death in a Cavan orphanage 50 years earlier.
This debut gives us an author's eye for setting that is absolutely
unrivalled.’ Critics' Choice, Irish Independent
‘It is a truly wonderful book. I
so admire the sheer scale of its historical depth and its ambition, ambition
perfectly realised. Your writing touches genuine depths of sorrow.’ Frank
McGuinness
‘Quite brilliant. The most
accurate evocation of teenage angst I have ever read’ Irish Examiner
‘It sends out a lyrical clarion
call for taking ‘the risk of being seen’, suggesting that a raw encounter with
painful truth, whatever its hue, is always more transfiguring than avoidance.
O’Connor’s bold new voice is, in every sense, a revelation; it proves her to be
a master in the art of fashioning stories revealing the real.’ Anna
Dillon