Seamus McKenna

E-mail: seamus@seamusmckenna.ie

A voracious reader from the youngest age, he quickly developed the urge to write. However, realising that a career as an author did not offer anything like a dependable path to making a living, never mind riches, he decided, when the time came to go to college, to study Civil Engineering. He spent several years practicing that profession, all the while writing to the papers, in particular the Irish Times. He has had hundreds of inclusions in the letters page of that newspaper over the years.

In time, he gained an MBA from Trinity College Dublin (TCD), and combined that with his engineering qualification to operate as a business analyst with several multi-national companies, including Shell Oil, based overseas. In the early 2000s he came back to Ireland to participate in the so-called Celtic Tiger, where those same skills allowed him to submit the most sublime proposals to financial institutions so that he could take part in property development. Rapid growth, lots of money, and an elevated lifestyle followed, right up to the onset of the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, when everything collapsed. He spent the next ten years battling with banks in an attempt to hold on to his home. He also published his first book, a best-selling treatment of algorithmic Foreign Exchange trading (The Omicron Forex Trading Manual (2012)). In 2023 he obtained an MA in Creative Writing from Dublin City University (DCU).

Now he has downsized, in all respects, and, while no longer living the high life, is comfortable. This means he can devote all his time to his first and only love, which is writing, both in fiction and non-fiction.