Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Kerri ní Dochartaigh

Kerri ní Dochartaigh was born in Derry, on the border of the North and South of Ireland, at the very height of the Troubles. She was brought up on a council estate on the wrong side of town. But for her family, and many others, there was no right side. One parent was Catholic, the other was Protestant. In the space of one year they were forced out of two homes and when she was eleven a homemade petrol bomb was thrown through her bedroom window. Terror was in the very fabric of the city, and for families like Kerri’s, the ones who fell between the cracks of identity, it seemed there was no escape.  Her 2020 book Thin Places was published by Canongate Books after a six-way contest between publishers. It is “a mixture of memoir, history and nature writing” and describes “a wild Ireland, an invisible border, an old conflict and the healing power of the natural world”, and was shortlisted for the 2020 Wainwright Prize for UK Nature Writing.

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