TOM O'CONNELL
Tom O’Connell lives in County Galway in Ireland. He holds degrees in English and law from the University of Galway, and won the Dr. H.H. Stewart and Peel prizes for English composition in 2018. The brief legal stint that followed couldn’t deter him from a lifelong love of writing, and he is currently studying for his MA in English, turning in papers rather than briefs.
This has required a litany of odd jobs to support himself, from jeweller to gym receptionist, but the thrill of creating written works sustains him most of all – and he feels he is doing justice, if not to the legal world, then to his five-year-old self, who was wont to hijack school lessons with handwritten stories brought from home.
Lichtenberg is his debut novel, a dystopian tale that draws on his academic background in exploring themes of language: its ability to distort perception, influence will, and create ideology. He similarly weaves his legal experience into the story, lending realism to his worldbuilding and the social structure of Lichtenberg’s unforgiving world. The novel was selected as one of the twelve winners of the Irish Writers Centre’s Novel Fair 2023.
Tom is an avid reader and writer of dystopia, and his short story Problem Child, to be released in Channel the Dark, Volume 2, weaves an element of fantastical horror into the genre. He is planning on pursuing a PhD in contemporary dystopian literature following the completion of his MA.
