Adrienne Dines
Contact Me
Read one of Adrienne's books? Want more information about her speaking events? She'd love to hear from you. Send her an email
Keep up to Date...
Want to be kept up to date with the latest information from Adrienne Dines? Sign up to the mailing list (coming soon!), or subscribe to my RSS feeds: blog / events.
About Adrienne
Adrienne Dines (Phillips) was born in Dublin and spent her childhood living in the various counties around - Carlow, Kilkenny, Kildare and eventually Meath. One of her earliest ambitions was to be a seanachai, a traditional storyteller, but the nun assured her that wasn’t possible.
‘Nobody pays you to tell stories these days,’ she said in the sort of voice that convinced you she knew.
She mightn’t have been right.
Adrienne read English, History and Psychology at Trinity College, Dublin and graduated in 1980. Convinced that there was a way to get people to pay her for telling stories she returned to get a teaching qualification and by the following year was an English and History teacher, ready to get into classrooms and tell the stories that pay the bills. Unfortunately, teaching jobs for newly qualified teachers English and History teachers, however enthusiastic, didn’t exist in Ireland in 1981. She emigrated.
Five years later, marriage to an oilman saw her packed off to Aberdeen for ten years where her three sons were born. In ’95 the family moved back to Surrey and she embarked, absolutely by accident, on a writing career.
In August 2005 her first novel, Toppling Miss April was published by Transita followed six months later by The Jigsaw Maker, one of Easons’ ‘Books of the Month’. In October 2006, her third novel Soft Voices Whispering was launched in the UK, and in Ireland in March 2007 in line with her ambition to ‘hit the ground running’.
The other accident was the launch of a speaking career. She is a well-established after dinner speaker or after luncheon as the case may be. Some of the talks are delivered in verse as it affords her the opportunity to say things that might raise an eyebrow in prose – much better to blame it on the rhyme.
Adrienne still lives and works in Weybridge but travels around the country giving talks and workshops for Literary Festivals, various professional / charitable organisations, and for people who ask her nicely. Especially for people who ask her nicely.
And she’s discovered that the nun was wrong – they do pay you to tell stories. Her next ambition is to come across someone sitting on the beach somewhere abroad, reading one of her stories. She’ll buy them an ice-cream.
And of course, she’ll keep running.
