Nuala Ni Chonchuir – författare

The women and men in Nude play out their desires and frustrations from Dublin to Paris, Delhi to Barcelona, and beyond. In these stories there are mercurial lovers, illicit affairs and mistakes that cannot be undone. And at the centre of it all is the unclothed body: in bedrooms, in art, and in and out of love. Award-winning writer Nuala Ní Chonchúir uses her trademark sensual frankness, coupled with poetic language, to weave an intoxicating spell in these stories. If fictional worlds pivot on yearning, then the characters in these stories yearn for passion, for understanding and, sometimes, for freedom.In the opening tale, a naive painter travels to early 1970’s Paris and meets fellow Irish artist Micheal O’Farrell; there she becomes the model for his iconic political nude ‘Madonna Irlanda’.Elsewhere, a master art forger is infatuated with his lovingly carved alabaster sculpture of an Egyptian princess, but he eventually falls foul of the Art Squad and loses everything.The story ‘Sloe Wine’ sees two teenage cousins begin a closer relationship with each other, while their mothers untangle the knots of their own teenage years and, in so doing, unleash a family secret.These are lush stories of visual art, the heart and the body, in all their beauties and betrayals; there is humour and quirkiness, but beneath that is the reassurance of truth – the hallmark of all quality fiction.

In Mother America and Other Stories mothers tattoo their children and abduct them; they act as surrogates and they use charms to cure childhood illnesses. The story ''Letters'' sees an Irish mother cling to love of her son, though he abandoned her in New York, where loneliness is alleviated only by letters she cannot read. In ''Queen of Tattoo'', Lydia, the tattooed lady from the Groucho Marx song, tries to understand why her son is a bad man. Set in Ireland and America, as well as Paris, Rome and Mexico, these stories map the lives of parents and the boundaries they cross. O''Connor''s sinewy prose dazzles as she exposes the follies of motherhood as well as its triumphs. Once again she spotlights the contradictions and fierce loves that shake up the life of the family.