Geraldine strikes Gold as she launches debut children’s novel

A young boy in giant ‘pollinator suits’ addresses the reader on the first page of Gold, the debut children’s novel from Galway author Geraldine Mills.

Starn and his twin brother Esper live with their father in a dark, silent world that has been devastated by a volcanic explosion, a world where nature has been destroyed and where humans have to develop ways of ensuring their own species can simply survive.

Geraldine, who has previously published adult fiction and poetry, is unusual among writers in that she has a background in both science and arts and both these disciplines come into play in this wonderful book, a page-turner from the beginning.

Now living in Rosscahill, near Oughterard, Geraldine was born in Ballyfoile (now Ballinfoile), before it was a suburb of Galway City, the second-youngest in a family of 10. After finishing secondary school at the Mercy in Newtownsmyth, she became one of the first students into the newly-built RTC (now GMIT), where she studied science “and loved it”.

On graduating from GMIT, she worked as a laboratory technician in UCD’s engineering department and did a BA at night, in English and Green and Roman studies.

Geraldine had loved science and English equally at school and had written “a little” when she was a teenager, “terrible stuff”, she says. But it never even dawned on her then that she could be a writer.

She met her husband Peter in Dublin and decided to give up work after her first child was born. Living in a housing estate, she “wouldn’t have survived without neighbours”. But she still needed more and when she saw an ad for a creative writing class, she joined it.

Moving back to Rosscahill in 1995 after 20 years in Dublin, Geraldine focused on creative writing, and has had four collections of poetry published, with 2010’s An Urgency of Stars being awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship. That was published by Galway company Arlen House, as were her three short fiction collections.

The idea for Gold, which is published by Little Island, came to her after she’d just finished her most recent short story collection Hellkite.

She’d previously started a children’s novel eight years ago, which featured two little boys but “it got nowhere”.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.