About

Welcome!

Shauna Gilligan is a novelist and short story writer from Dublin.  She has lived and worked in Mexico, Spain, and the UK, and now lives in Kildare with her family and a black and white cat called Lucky.

A graduate of University College Dublin, she also holds a PhD in Writing from the University of South Wales, is a registered teacher with the Teaching Council of Ireland, a member of the Arts Council of Ireland Writers-in-Prisons Panel and a Professional Mentor with Irish Writers’ Centre. Shauna facilitates creative writing workshops with people of all ages and teaches in higher education, further education, and prison settings.

Shauna enjoys collaborating with visual artists and is particularly interested in exploring the crossover of art and literature in storytelling, the depiction of historical events in fiction, perception and interpretation of body, and creative processes.

In 2023 she was awarded a Brigid 1500 Arts and Creativity Grant, and in 2022 she received an Arts Act Grant (Kildare County Council) for research into Brigid/Brigit. In 2021 she was awarded a Government of Ireland Creative Ireland Bursary (Kildare) for a collaborative project, Mantles.

Her debut novel Happiness Comes from Nowhere was a critical success and the Sunday Independent review declared it to be a “thoroughly enjoyable and refreshingly challenging debut novel.” See full review here.

Shauna is represented by Literary Agent Charlotte Seymour at Johnson & Alcock Ltd, London.

Shauna Gilligan would like to thank Kildare County Council, Brigid 1500 Arts and Creativity and Creative Ireland for continued support of her writing.