More great news on the publishing front for the MA in Creative Writing. A novel by Thomas Moore (class of 2016/17), set during the American Civil War, has been accepted by an American publisher and will appear this spring. 

A Fatal Mercy centres around events at the battle of Gettysburg that are resurrected for the novel’s hero at the 50th anniversary celebrations of the war in 1913  when 50,000 Union and Confederate veterans returned to the battlefield to remember their experiences. (Very pertinent to Irish readers during our season of civil war commemorations.)

Thomas wrote part of the novel during his MA and presented it for his thesis.  It was subsequently long-listed for the 2017 Bridport Prize for Fiction. A Fatal Mercy: The Man Who Lost the American Civil War will be published by Shotwell Publishing, based in Columbia, South Carolina, who specialize in Southern regional literature.

Congratulations to Tom, who’s well into his second novel, also on a historical theme, this time set in Tudor England.  It’s the story of an unlikely Irishman who stumbles on the answer to the greatest unsolved mystery of the time: who really murdered the two Plantagenet Princes in the Tower of London in 1485? 

Clue:  it’s not Richard the Third, apparently.