She grew up between Tubbercurry and Castlebar, in the west of Ireland, the daughter of a Catholic family that had emigrated to Great Britain. She currently lives in London and regularly writes for The Guardian, New Statesman, and The Irish Times.
Her first novel, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (2013), won a number of literary awards and has been translated into several languages. Following her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians (2017), she established herself as one of Ireland’s most widely read authors and in 2018 was nominated among the top ten contemporary English-language writers, according to The Times’ literary supplement.