Christina McKenna is an author who was born and grew up in Draperstown

Draperstown

Draperstown is a village in the Sperrin Mountains of County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. It had a population of 1,638 people in the 2001 Census.-Name:...

, County Londonderry

County Londonderry

The place name Derry is an anglicisation of the old Irish Daire meaning oak-grove or oak-wood. As with the city, its name is subject to the Derry/Londonderry name dispute, with the form Derry preferred by nationalists and Londonderry preferred by unionists...

, Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland

Northern Ireland is one of the four countries of the United Kingdom. Situated in the north-east of the island of Ireland, it shares a border with the Republic of Ireland to the south and west...

. McKenna attended the Belfast College of Art where she obtained an honours degree in Fine Art and studied postgraduate English at the University of Ulster

University of Ulster

The University of Ulster is a multi-campus, co-educational university located in Northern Ireland. It is the largest single university in Ireland, discounting the federal National University of Ireland...

. In 1986, she left Northern Ireland and spent ten years teaching both these subjects in Madrid

Madrid

Madrid is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan...

, Istanbul

Istanbul

Istanbul , historically known as Byzantium and Constantinople , is the largest city of Turkey. Istanbul metropolitan province had 13.26 million people living in it as of December, 2010, which is 18% of Turkey's population and the 3rd largest metropolitan area in Europe after London and...

, and Milan

Milan

Milan is the second-largest city in Italy and the capital city of the region of Lombardy and of the province of Milan. The city proper has a population of about 1.3 million, while its urban area, roughly coinciding with its administrative province and the bordering Province of Monza and Brianza ,...

.

McKenna was, at the same time, pursuing a successful career as a painter. She mounted several exhibitions of her work, both as a solo artist and in group context when abroad, but also on her return to Northern Ireland.

Publications

• My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress is a memoir (2004 Neil Wilson Publishing, Glasgow, Scotland) that charts her struggle to make sense of the hidebound Catholicism
  Catholicism
  Catholicism is a broad term for the body of the Catholic faith, its theologies and doctrines, its liturgical, ethical, spiritual, and behavioral characteristics, as well as a religious people as a whole....
  
  of her childhood, and how art and poetry freed her to follow a more spiritual path. It also contains an exorcism which took place in the family home when she was eleven. Revisiting this episode served as the genesis for her next publication.

• The Dark Sacrament (2006 Gill & Macmillan, Dublin,) co-authored with her husband, David M. Kiely, contains nine contemporary cases of exorcism in Ireland. A special American edition was published in October 2007 by HarperOne, San Francisco. It contains additional material.

• The Misremembered Man is her first novel. Set in rural Northern Ireland in 1974, this tragi-comic work charts the progress of a lonely farmer in his attempts to find a wife. All the while he is pursued by dark ghosts from a terrible childhood of physical and sexual abuse. A screen adaptation is already in development by Hollywood producer, Robert Shapiro.

External links

• Christina McKenna website