Jo O’Neill

Once a projects director, I hung up my construction helmet in 2024 to settle in England and start a new journey as a writer. What an amazing time it has been.

I have always written, but the odd satirical short story or poem was all that I had time for. Then one day I woke in the early hours of one morning having had an almost complete plot for a novel presented to me in a dream. The next day I set about writing it down and entered the complicated, infuriating, exhilarating, exhausting world of novel-writing.

There I was thinking that writing a book involved getting the words out then sitting back and admiring them. Now I know that the first draft is a quarter of the work, that just because I like what I have written doesn’t mean a reader will, and that there will be days that I cannot find a sentence, alternating with days when I write for twenty hours straight.

Now my work is ready to read, and I hope that it means something to someone. I have a fascination for human psychology - individual and collective - and, whether based in the present or rooted in history, my books explore resilience in the face of the darker side of human nature.