Author Page - Tom Galvin
Tom Galvin began writing music and lyrics in his teens and performed throughout his 20's before travelling to eastern Europe, settling in Poland for five years where he taught in a state school to earn his keep, continued playing music with a local blues band to remain sane, and began writing as a series vocation. He also travelled widely, choosing locations that would provide inspiration and settings for his future novels and continues to travel to locations that provide unique back drops in which to place his characters. Alongside his music and writing, he studied photography on his return to Ireland in 2000, specialising in black and white developing techniques and the combination of skills inform his writing at every turn. His work is a movie come to life on the page; pulsing with sound and coming to life with intense visual imagery. Each scene is a carefully drawn tableau of sensory detail that rings out with volume, imagery, depth and full-bodied sound; from the chase scene through the Mexican jungle in White Skin, Black Hearts, to the awakening motions of the Russian city of Kaliningrad in the early morning rising sun in Russian Doll.
ABOUT TOM
Dublin-born Tom Galvin was educated at University College Dublin and St Patrick's College, Maynooth. He has a BA in English and Philosophy and MA in Philosophy, having written his dissertation on Albert Camus’ The Rebel. Tom is a journalist/writer by trade and also makes a living as a musician.
In 1994 Tom went with APSO (Agency for Personal Service Overseas), the state body for development Overseas, to Poland to work as a teacher in a state school. There, he began writing regularly for the Warsaw Voice, the English language paper for Poland and Central Europe, about life in a small town outside Warsaw. His writing, observations of daily life, the characters in the town, was essentially a column for ex-pats living in Warsaw, giving them a picture of what was considered closer to the ‘real’ Poland. He finished his first novel, Gabriel’s Gate, whilst there and self-published it in Warsaw, selling copies in the Irish bars and anywhere else that would take it. In the late nineties, he contributed to programmes on Poland's English language service on Radio Polonia.
He left Poland after five years and returned to Ireland where he began working as a staff writer (and later editor) for In Dublin magazine as well as contributing travel features to other titles including the Sunday Independent, The Irish Times, Backpacker and Abroad magazine. In 2004 he wrote The Little Book of Dublin for New Island and contributed to the opinion columns of the Evening Herald before working as Arts/Culture editor of Village magazine. The following year, while editor of the Evening Herald’s Polish section, Tom published his account of life in Poland in his book There’s an Egg in My Soup (O’Brien Press) which was critically well-received. He is presently the books editor with the Evening Herald.
In his spare time, besides writing, Tom is a keen photographer. He has studied photography intensively over the past ten years and specialises in black and white developing techniques. His photographs have been exhibited and published in a variety of magazines. He is still a working musician, playing two or three times a month to audiences in clubs and pubs around Ireland. He is married to Asha and lives in Wicklow, just outside Dublin, with their twin babies.
TOM'S WORK
Tom writes visual, tangible, sensory stories that are adaptable for the screen. He tries to write as if he’s watching a movie, making his scenes incredibly real, raw and drawing them in the reader’s imagination. His work always focuses on the human condition, writ small in the lives of the ordinary man. He draws on the larger biblical themes of good and evil, imperialism, mortality and human frailty, transplanting them onto the more intimate experiences of an individual, trying to make their own sense of the world around them. Tom’s work is informed by that of his literary heros; Jack London, Samuel Beckett, Charles Bukowski, Ryszard Kapuscinski and Albert Camus but is uniquely and refreshingly his own.
Interested in hearing more from Walsh Communications?
Tom's Books
- The RUSSIAN DOLL: Click here to read chapter samples.
- WHITE SKIN, BLACK HEARTS: Click here to read chapter samples.
