Bridget O'Connor was a BAFTA-winning author, playwright and screenwriter.
Early life and education
O'Connor was born in Harrow, north-west London, the second of five children. Her father Jim was from Cork in Ireland, and her mother Bridie was from Limerick. Despite living in Harrow, O'Connor was surrounded by cèilidh bands and Irish dancing, spending her summer holidays on Banna Strand. She attended Catholic schools, before graduating from Lancaster University in 1982 with an undergraduate in English and Creative Writing. After her studies, she worked in a building-site canteen and bookshop.
Writing career
O'Connor's first success in writing came in 1991, when her story "Harp" won the Time OutShort Story Prize. After this she wrote two collections of stories: Here Comes John was published in 1993, and Tell Her You Love Her was published in 1997. Both were published by Cape. One story, "Postcards", was featured in the first edition of The New Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction, and "A Woman's Hair" was included in the second edition in 2000. She worked as Northern Arts literary fellow at Durham and Newcastle University from 1996 until 1998, meeting fellow writer and future husband Peter Straughan. She was briefly the writer-in-residence at University of East Anglia in 2000. Her plays were often broadcast on BBC Radio 4, such as The Centurions, States of Mind, and Becoming the Rose, which won the Arts Council England's Write Out Loud award in 2000. While living in Cork, O'Connor began writing a full-length stage play, called The Flags. Full of black comedy, it told the story of two lifeguards on Ireland's "second-worst beach". The play was directed by Greg Hersov and was first performed in Manchester's Royal Exchange Studio, before moving to the main theatre. After its Manchester run, it was produced in Liverpool, Dublin, Belfast, Slovenia, and Australia, and was translated into French in 2011. In a review in The Guardian by Alfred Hickling, it was given four out of five stars and described as being "as sharp and gritty as the authentic Galway sand covering the floor". She was later commissioned by several theatres, including the Tricycle Theatre and the Royal Exchange. She began writing a feature film called The Lovers for Live Theatre Company, and a short film called Dead Terry.
In 2001, O'Connor and Straughan moved from Hackney to Cork with their daughter Connie. They later moved to Hove in East Sussex, and married in May 2008. She was first diagnosed with breast cancer during her pregnancy, but recovered from it. In a 2007 interview with The Irish Times, she expressed her desire not to be seen as a "breast cancer writer", avoiding the topic in her writing due to a fear of being "pigeonholed" into the subject. She eventually died from cancer on 22 September 2010.
