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Award recognition

finalist for Commentator of the year (popular) at the Society of Editors’ Media Freedom Awards in 2025. This was in recognition of her work as a columnist, where she published cultural criticism for a national audience.

tHE Observer

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch review – a tale of Dublin’s descent into dystopia is crucial reading

Reviewed Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song for The Observer ahead of its Booker Prize win, situating the dystopian Irish novel within a wider landscape of political upheaval.

The Irish Times

I was a regular contributor to the Irish Times’s book pages for book criticism.

Highlights include:

  • Kaveh Akbar, Martyr!
  • A.K. Blakemore, The Glutton
  • Mary Morrissey, Penelope Unbound
  • André Dao, Anam

Dublin Review of Books

On connection, loss and grief in Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo

I was commissioned by DRB to review the book of the summer – Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo. In this essay, I wrote about Rooney’s work as cultural events that break beyond the literary world.

An excerpt from the essay:

Marketing is fleeting, but art is not. Intermezzo is a markedly existential novel, one that focuses on life, death, and how we can traverse our material realities under capitalism and the Sisyphean tasks where we clock in, clock out, pay bills. All the while ecosystems are crumbling under the strain of emissions. And people feel lonelier and more disconnected than ever, despite increased ‘connectivity’ through the internet. Intermezzo asks us, the reader: is there another way to live? How can we live a life, when the world is the way it is? In this new novel, Rooney, as is her trademark style, renders the connections between friends and lovers as if the world depends on it, and I should think, it does.

RTÉ Culture

I was also a regular contributor to RTÉ Culture, where I reviewed forthcoming Irish fiction.

  • Anne Enright, The Wren, The Wren
  • Paul Murray, The Bee Sting
  • Nuala O’Connor, Seaborne
  • Caoilinn Hughes, The Alternatives

The Independent

I was commissioned and wrote a cultural analysis essay on the weaponisation of therapy-speak.

What happens when an emotional abuser goes to therapy?

Dua lipa’s Service95

Reported and analysed the systemic nature of violence against women in Ireland for Service95, combining historical research with interviews to examine the failures of the justice system.

Ireland has a misogyny problem – and women have had enough.

Dazed

For Dazed, examined the contemporary fixation on anti-ageing as a cultural response to climate crisis, pandemic anxiety and digital self-surveillance, arguing that beauty culture has become a proxy battleground for fears about mortality and collapse.

Are we trying to stop the end of the world with Botox?

The mirror

as columnist and editor at this national newspaper, I was tasked with bringing cultural commentary and literary criticism to a new audience. Here are my highlights:

more on my Mirror author profile, here.