Seamus McKenna

Seamus’s primary qualification is in Civil Engineering. He holds an MBA from Trinity College Dublin.

In 2023 he graduated with an MA in Creative Writing from Dublin City University (DCU)

He’s been a reader from the youngest age. In earlier years books such as Fear of Flying by Erica Jong, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Robinson by Muriel Spark, practically everything that Graham Greene ever wrote, John McGahern’s major works, The Feast by Margaret Kennedy, White Tiger by Aravind Adiga, and Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh made lasting impressions.

An academic friend who examined his bookshelves noted that he seemed to read an awful lot of biography and history, to which he had to plead guilt, but he’s also been delighted and inspired by the very best novelists: Ernest Hemingway, Ian McEwan, Barbara Kingsolver, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hilary Mantel, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Claire Keegan, Anthony Trollope, Tom Wolfe, William Makepeace Thackery, Vladimir Nabokov, among a great many more of history’s superlative writers; not forgetting, of course, James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, for the style.

More recently he has taken an interest in the work of Megan Nolan, Paul Murray, Ann Enright, Mike McCormack, and Kevin Barry.

His first novel, The Maker’s Name, is currently seeking an agent. He was thrilled when Kirkus Reviews recommended its manuscript to readers, saying, inter alia,: “McKenna skillfully weaves together a story of one family through several decades… This is an engaging, fast-paced story filled with treachery, backstabbing, and blind ambition … The narrative moves quickly and smoothly while managing to carefully construct the foundation for the brothers’ rivalry.”

He is the author of The Omicron Forex Trading Manual (2012), which is available from Amazon.com and all its worldwide sites. See it here: https://www.amazon.com/Omicron-Forex-Trading-Manual/dp/1479247138

His blog, Stack Six, can be found at http://stacksix.blogspot.com/

He’s been having his letters published in The Irish Times and other publications since 1978.

On 21st July 2024 he broadcast his short-form piece “Chickens, Hurling and a Famous Bootmaker” on RTE Radio 1’s Sunday Miscellany (New writing for radio).

He lives in Maynooth with his long-suffering but supportive wife, Marilyn. They have a son and a daughter, two granddaughters and two grandsons.