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Orna Ross | |
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| Born | Aine McCarthy Waterford, Ireland |
| Occupation | Author |
| Nationality | Irish |
| Alma mater | University College Dublin |
| Website | |
| www | |
Orna Ross is the pen name of Aine McCarthy, [1] born 1960. She is an Irish author, [2] former university teacher [3] and advocate for creativism. [4] [5] She is the founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, [6] [7] a professional association for authors who self-publish their work, and has been named one of the top 100 most influential people in publishing by The Bookseller, the UK publishing trade magazine. [8] [9]
Ross was born in Waterford, Ireland and was raised in Murrintown, County Wexford. She attended Murrintown National School and the Loreto Convent Wexford. She completed two degrees at the University College Dublin, including a Bachelor's degree in English Literature and a Master’s Degree in Women’s Studies. She also worked for some years as a lecturer in culture and creativity studies at UCD, teaching a groundbreaking Creative & Imaginative Practice course that forms the basis of her Go Creative! book series. [10]
She is related to author and historian Nicholas Furlong as well as director of Tandem Press Paula Panczenko. [11]
Ross published her first two books, A Lover's Hollow [12] and A Dance in Time, with Penguin Books. [13] In 2011, she took her rights back to self-publish her own work, publishing the first two books in The Irish Trilogy series: After the Rising and Before the Fall. Since then, Ross has gone on to self-publish multiple other works like her standalone award-winning novel Blue Mercy [13] [14] . Ross published a double special edition work titled Secret Rose as a tribute to W. B. Yeats in 2015 which compiles Yeats' The Secret Rose (1897) and Ross' Her Secret Rose (2015). [15]
That same year, Ross contributed a volume to Outside the Box: Women Writing Women. [16] She collaborated on the box set of novels with six other female writers. [17] Ross' works of fiction are often set in her home country of Ireland and have won multiple awards like the CAP Carousel Award and Goethe Grand Prize (2021) [18] . Her family drama sagas have been lauded by the Sunday Independent, Irish Times, RTÉ Guide and many other review outlets. [19] [20] [21]
Orna Ross is also a poet and a creative practitioner. Ross has published multiple poetry collections over the years, each collection on a different topic: motherhood, love, loss and new beginnings. Her work Allowing Now has won the Gold Award at the Literary Titan Book Awards [22] Ross also practises and teaches 'creativism' through her work under Go Creative! She defines 'creativism' as the conscious application of creative principles to everything in life [23] .
Ross believes strongly in the benefits of self-publishing [24] for authors both established and just starting out in their careers. [25] In 2012, she launched the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), a not-for-profit organization that aims to protect the rights of writers and promote self-published books. [26] [27]
In her capacity as the head of ALLi, she has advised the BBC on publishing costs for an independent author. [28] In 2014, she was referred to by The Guardian as an "indie star" of the writing world, and featured on the Guardian Books Podcast. [29]
McCarthy has been married for over thirty years, and has two children named Ornagh and Ross (whose names she combines to use as her pen name). She currently lives and writes in London. In 2008, she revealed her breast cancer diagnosis. [51]
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