About

If you want to know the boring bits about me, you can read my Wikipedia entry.

Instead of repeating all that, here are five slightly more interesting Nicola Monaghan facts:

1. Career highlights have included interviewing my heroes Chuck Palahniuk and Irvine Welsh, at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema and Media Centre.

2. My first published work was in the Nottingham Evening Post circa 1986, when I was on work experience at the newspaper. It was a very short article about a man called Austin Morris, who was in court accused of a driving offence. The subs cut it down from 500 words to 50; my first real lesson as a writer.

3. I spent a good deal of time on business in the World Trade Center during the summer of 2001, on 86th floor of Tower One. In a minor miracle, all of my colleagues survived the attacks. Read more about that on my old, dark blog.

4. I appeared on the pilot of the Alan Titchmarsh show and told the audience about a childhood experience where a young lad was set on fire in the street outside my mamma’s* house. They decided not to go with a Books feature after that.

5. I did a maths degree and worked in high finance for years. My second novel Starfishing is set in the City of London, something I was encouraged to write about by my City Lit tutor, the wonderful Julia Casterton. Some of my next published writing was ad copy in the Futures and Options World magazine. I’m still proud of our record of extremely cheesy puns, based around the words ‘future’, ‘options’ and ‘LIFFE’.

* Mamma is said ‘mommar’ and is a Nottingham word for Grandma. My mamma worked at the Nottingham Evening Post as a copy writer. She corrected my grammar, and helped me with cryptic crosswords, which I still can’t solve with the consistency that she could. I miss her, and wish she’d been around to see me published.

Contact Nicola Monaghan