Eilís Dillon

Who was Eilís Dillon?

Eilís Dillon was an Irish author of 50 books. Her work has been translated into 14 languages.

Dillon's family was involved in Irish revolutionary politics; her uncle Joseph Mary Plunkett was a signatory of the 1916 Proclamation and was executed after the Easter Rising.

Educated by the Ursuline nuns in Sligo, she worked briefly in the hotel and catering trade. In 1940 she married Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, an academic from University College Cork and 17 years her senior. They had at least 3 children, including the Irish poet and Trinity College Dublin professor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and her brother, Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, also a Trinity professor, who writes novels as Cormac Millar.

She started to produce children's books, in Irish, and later in English in the 1940s, including a string of successful teenage novels, some of which were still in print 50 years later.

In the 1960s she moved to Rome. Following her husband's death in 1970 she published her most successful historical novel, Across the Bitter Sea, and in 1974 married the American-based critic and professor Vivian Mercier.

Eilís Dillon died in 1994 and is buried beside her second husband in Clara, County Offaly; a prize in her memory is given annually as part of the Bisto Book of the Year Awards.