Maura McHugh

Born in the USA Maura was transplanted early to the West of Ireland where she bloomed into a reader of sf, fantasy, and horror literature after a visiting cousin left behind a copy of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. On occasion her parents voiced concerns about Maura's weird reading material, but she turned out all right in the end.

Over the years she has obtained a B.A. in English and History, a M.A. in English (a research thesis on 19th century Anglo-Irish supernatural fiction), completed a short course on filmmaking, a Diploma in Film Studies, and a M.A. in Screenwriting. For four years she helped run Octocon, the Irish national sf convention, and it imprinted on her a love of conventions and meeting people with similar passions. She ignored her abiding interest in writing for a number of years when she was lured into a career in IT, but eventually she could no longer ignore the clamour of characters and stories in her head.

In 2006 she was delighted to be accepted into the Clarion West Writers Workshop in Seattle: a six-week residential course that selects 18 writers from an international field to train them to be professional writers of sf/fantasy/horror. She was the recipient of the Gordon R Dickson scholarship for that year, and was the first Irish writer to attend Clarion West.

She lives in the West of Ireland with her husband Martin, and works part-time for the Irish Playwrights and Screenwriters Guild as a webmaster, newsletter editor, and blogger.

Maura writes as much as possible, and her short stories and poetry have been published in Flash Me Magazine, Cabinet des Fées, the Fantasy Magazine anthology, the Jabberwocky 3 anthology, Shroud Magazine, and Aoife's Kiss. She has work forthcoming from Black Static, Arkham Tales, Doorways Magazine, Paradox Magazine, All Hallows and Goblin Fruit. Her short story, "Bone Mother", will be podcast via Pseudopod in 2009.