Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish ​writer devoted to exploring how the past makes itself felt within the present.

Said the Dead

The more she learned, the more certain she became: this other world was alive and true and trembling, and very close to her own.

Now she had a secret

In the city of Cork, a derelict Victorian mental hospital is being converted into modern apartments. One passerby has always flinched as she passes the place. Had she lived in another time, she too might have found herself held within those walls.

Now, she notices a sign: FOR SALE.

It is the first of many signs. Guided by an irresistible impulse, she follows them. Soon, she is trespassing, stealing, absconding from the routine of mother, spouse, daughter, as she uncovers a chorus of startling voices: those of the women who knew the hospital best. They murmur from archives and old records. They haunt from stairwells and walls. In them - and in one figure in particular -- she may find meaning and solace, righteous anger, salvation even. Or her final vanishing?

A work of sublime intensity and tenderness, Said the Dead breaks the boundaries between worlds -- past and present, imagined and real, fact and fiction -- to make something new and lasting: an experience full of danger, full of love and full of truth.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish ​writer devoted to exploring how the past makes itself felt within the present.

‘​​A Ghost in the Throat’ finds an 18th century poet haunting a young mother, leading her through visions of blood, milk, lust, and murder. Written on the roof of a multi-storey car park in Ireland, it went on to be described as “powerful” (New York Times), “captivatingly original” (The Observer), and a “masterpiece” (Sunday Business Post). ​'A Ghost in the Throat’ won the James Tait Black Prize and was voted overall Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, while the US edition was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. It was translated into 20 further languages worldwide.

Both history and ghost story, 'Said the Dead' distils hundreds of hours of archival research towards a polyphonic portrayal of a 19th century asylum. A deeply haunted book, it has been praised as 'wildly imaginative' (The Guardian) and 'electrifying' (Times Literary Supplement).

Doireann is also the author of seven critically-acclaimed books of poetry, each a deepening exploration of birth, death, desire, and domesticity.

Awards for her writing include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA), the Ostana Prize (Italy), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship, and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature​, among others.

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