Pat O'Shea

1 universe Last reviewed 2026-09-27

Pat O'Shea (1931-2007), born Patricia Mary Shiels in Galway, was an Irish children's writer who spent the first sixteen years of her life in Ireland before moving to England, where she worked for a time in a bookshop. The Hounds of the Morrigan, her first novel, took thirteen years to write and was published by Oxford University Press in 1985; it became a best-seller, was translated into several languages, and drew on the people and places of her Galway childhood as well as on Irish mythology. The novel draws on the Irish mythology of the Morrígan, the Dagda and Cú Chulainn, transplanted into the modern Galway she knew as a child. It remained the most celebrated of the small number of books she completed, alongside two shorter works for younger readers, and has been described in The Irish Times as possibly the greatest Irish children's book ever written.

Universe(s)

Books

• The Hounds of the Morrigan (1985) · The Hounds of the Morrigan Core Canon

Aggregate across all universes

• Total Core Canon books across all universes: 1 book
• Award recognitions across all universes: 0 (None recorded)

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