Nicola Monaghan

Nicola Monaghan is an English novelist and author of The Killing Jar, Starfishing and The Okinawa Dragon.

Monaghan was listed in The Independent’s New Year 2006 list of rising talent, and won a Betty Trask Award, the Author's Club Best First Novel Prize and the Waverton Good Read Award for her debut. Her second novel Starfishing and novella The Okinawa Dragon came out in 2008. She has also had stories published in anthologies and magazines, including Sunday Night and Monday Morning (Five Leaves), Cool Brittania (Wachenbach) and online magazine Pulp.Net

Monaghan was the first fellow of The National Academy of Writing, which is based at the Birmingham City University but left in 2009. She is currently a writer=in-residence for the charity First Story. Since September 2010 she has worked at the University of Nottingham running the Creative and Professional Writing BA course.

Reviews of The Killing Jar

• New Zealand Listener
• The Written Nerd
• East London and West Essex Guardian
• The Observer
• Mslexia
• The Independent

Starfishing

This is Monaghan’s second novel, and was published by Chatto and Windus in March 2008. It is based in the City of London in the late 1990s and is about Frankie Cavanagh, a LIFFE futures trader, working and playing hard and trying to keep up with the boys. She starts an affair with her boss, Tom, and the two go down a destructive route together. The book is dark, with gothic overtones, and some very subtle references to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. As with Monaghan's previous work, the imagery is rich and very sensual, and the narrative fast paced. The story takes place as the financial world begins to be taken over by electronic trading on screens and traders struggle to cope with this transition,

The Okinawa Dragon

Monaghan's third book is a short novella published by Five Leaves Publications, also in 2008. Again written in a pacey, first person voice, it tells the story of Jack, a card trader. He's the ultimate alpha male with high powered customers all over the world. One of Jack's richest clients wants to own a very rare trading card, The Okinawa Dragon but it belongs to a Japanese businessman who isn't prepared to sell. Jack travels to Japan to 'acquire' the card.

External links

• Nicola Monaghan’s website
• Questions and Answers with Nicola Monaghan - Hortorian.com
• The Betty Trask Awards
• Independent: Rising Stars of 2006
• Independent 50 Hot Books summer 2006
• The National Academy of Writing

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Name	Monaghan, Nicola
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Date of birth	1971
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