Biography
Irish author and screenwriter Sally Rooney is a critically acclaimed author who was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2022. Born in County Mayo in 1991, Rooney studied English at Trinity College Dublin before graduating in 2013 with a degree in American Literature. While at university, she was an active member of the debate club and attended the European Universities Debating Championships in 2013.
After leaving university, she was at a restaurant in an administrative role and began writing in her spare time in 2014. The next year, she wrote an essay entitled Even If You Beat Me about her experiences as a competitive debater; it was seen by an agent who contacted Rooney to ask for a manuscript. In 2017, after a 7-way auction, Conversations With Friends was published. It went on to be nominated for the Folio Prize, and won the Sunday Times/Peters Fraser & Dunlop Young Writer Of The Year Award.
In 2018, Rooney published Normal People. Following the relationship between two young people as they emerge from adolescence into young adulthood, dealing with everything from sex and relationships to drugs and abuse, it quickly became a cultural phenomenon. Winning the Waterstones’ Book Of The Year and the Costa Book Award, it was adapted into a mini series by the BBC.
Exploring complex relationships, the unspoken social structures of modern society and the anxieties, fears and disillusionments of the newly adult, Sally Rooney is the authentic, relatable and engaging voice of the millennial generation.
