‘People told me a career in writing was not going to happen, that I should wise up, go to uni and get a job’

Claire Mcgowan tells Andrew Madden about her journey from wannabe writer in library-lacking Rostrevor to award-winning, best-selling author

FROM growing up in a rural Co Down village with no library to becoming an award-winning author who has sold over a million books, it’s been quite the journey for Claire Mcgowan.

The writer has penned more than 20 books, from thrillers to non-fiction, as well as radio plays, and several of her books are in development for TV and film.

She also ran the UK’S first master’s degree course in crime writing for five years.

Ahead of the release of her new novel, Truth Truth Lie, Claire (43) revealed how she had convinced herself she’d failed at writing in her 20s and how a last-minute decision to enter a writing competition helped change her life.

Now living in London, her growing profile contrasts to her early years growing up amid the rural tranquillity of Rostrevor.

“When I was a kid, we lived in a little cul-de-sac of houses, and our home was the last house in the village for a long time, so we just had fields beside it,” she recalled.

“I went to a very small school in Killowen, which is a little bit further down the road, and there were only about 12 people in my year. You wouldn’t even really call Killowen a village, it’s that small.”

Claire said she was a voracious reader as a child and could “easily” go through 10 books a week.

“There was no library in Rostrevor, so I had to go to the one in Warrenpoint,” she explained.

“I would go every week and the ladies who worked there would keep books for me.

“They would even let me read adult books when I was still in primary school, which you weren’t supposed to do. I’d eventually pretty much read everything that they had.”

Claire’s first attempt at writing a novel came at only nine years of age.

“I just wrote a few pages of it. I always used to write little stories when I was a kid,” she added.

Claire studied English and French at university but said being an author was always her ambition.

“I just didn’t really think that was something that people did, especially not people from Rostrevor,” she said.

Claire had been writing for years but for a long time “had never finished anything”.

“I would sometimes write quite a lot of a book,” she said.

“I had quite a few books where I’d written around 30,000 words, but then I would just stop. I didn’t know how to finish them.

“Finally, I decided I had to finish something, so I spent three years writing a book quite tortuously, with lots of deletions and rewrites.

“I eventually finished it and started sending it out to agents, but I didn’t know that you could send it to more than one at a time. So I was just waiting for a long time to hear back from people. I actually wrote something else in the meantime.”

That “something else in the meantime” was The Fall, which Claire wrote in three months.

“Then a friend of mine sent me a link to a writing competition and it was closing the next day,” she recalled.

“I had a minute where I weighed it up: ‘Should I [submit] the old book that I’ve worked on

‘Believe it can happen ... I convinced myself that I’d failed already at writing in my 20s’

for years or just [submit] this new one that I literally just finished the day before?’ So I just randomly decided to submit the new one.

“I ended up coming second in that competition and getting an agent from that. The book was written and sold within about six months.”

Claire got a two-book deal and was keen to make a change, so she left her day job working for a charity.

In 2019 she published What You Did, which was a huge hit and made the Washington Post’s bestseller list.

“I’d been writing for quite a long time at that point. I always had good reviews but didn’t really sell that much,” she said.

“So it was really nice to see it taking off and doing well — not just here, but in America as well.”

Some of Claire’s work has been women’s fiction written under the pen name Eva Woods.

“It’s pretty common actually for people to use different names, particularly when it’s a different genre, a different brand,” the author explained.

“But in my case, it was more that it was just a totally different type of book. So if people were looking for crime, they wouldn’t want to end up with a romcom instead.”

Claire has also ventured into the world of non-fiction, notably with 2022’s The Vanishing Triangle, which examined the unsolved disappearances of eight women in the Irish Republic in the 1990s.

The process was very different compared to writing fiction, she said: “It confirmed to me my long belief that I was definitely not cut out for journalism. I like to make things up.

“But it was really interesting to kind of delve deeply into people — not just those cases, but other cases of missing women too.

“I hadn’t heard about the cases when I was growing up, which was when they were happening.

“When I was researching my novels, I kind of came across the cases and I was quite surprised that I’d never heard about them before.

“My publisher just happened to ask me — I think they had just bought Audible at the time — if I knew of any true crime cases that would make a good podcast or audiobook. I immediately said: ‘Well, there are these cases.’ They were very interested in the idea.”

The eldest of four siblings, Claire has previously discussed how she drew on the experience of growing up with her younger brother David, who has a rare chromosomal disorder, and how it inspired her recent novel This Could Be Us.

The NI author’s latest book, Truth Truth Lie, however, is set on an island in Scotland and involves friendship, mystery and murder.

“I like writing about small casts of people and friends with conflict within them,” she explained.

“Truth Truth Lie is about a group of university friends who go to a small Scottish island for the 40th birthday of two of them, who are twins, and they all get stuck on the island.

“It’s quite luxurious, but it’s also a very small island, very cut off. There’s no ferry; there’s no way off the island until somebody comes back with a boat and gets them.

“Over the course of the weekend they play some games, including one called Truth Truth Lie, which leads them to discovering lots of things about each other. Then secrets start spilling out and then people start to get killed off.”

Claire has also applied her talents to radio plays and screenwriting.

“I really enjoy doing the radio stuff because it’s a great way for authors to kind of find their feet with script writing,” she said.

“Stations are also willing to commission new authors, people who haven’t written scripts before. TV I really enjoy, but I find it really difficult to break into it, even with a lot of novels behind me.”

Claire has already completed her next book to follow Truth Truth Lie, but she’s keeping the details under wraps for now.

“So I’ve got the book coming out in May, and then, because I’m always so far ahead, I have the next book down as well. That’ll be out next year,” she told us.

“Then I’ve got a couple of cool, exciting TV projects kind of rumbling away, so I’m hoping I’ll be working on some things like that.

“This year is actually going to be the first year since I started that I’ll only have one book out — so it’s been relatively quiet.”

Asked what advice she would give to aspiring authors, Claire replied: “I’d say just believe that it can happen.

“When I was growing up in Rostrevor, I wanted to be a writer, but I didn’t think that it was possible.

“People around me would tell me that it’s not going to happen, that I should wise up and go to university, get a job. I think that was actually bad advice.

“I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy going to university, but I didn’t need to go to university for what I’ve ended up doing.

“What I should have done was probably just dedicate myself completely to writing.

“Just go for it. Don’t give up before you’ve even tried. I sort of convinced myself that I’d failed already at writing in my 20s and I hadn’t even shown my work to anyone for about

10 years, but eventually I got there.”