Deirdre Quiery

I was the first person in the UK to go through a heart operation where they didn’t touch my heart. It was 1957. My mother was pregnant and she was the second person in the UK to be operated on to repair a faulty mitral valve.  She was seven months pregnant with me when they operated on her heart. Two months later I shot into the world with no-one around apart from my mother. That sent the nurses into a panic and they didn’t scrub up and my mother developed peritonitis which led to her nearly dying and having a near death experience which I turned into a scene with Maria in my first novel Eden Burning.

Then life unfolded into a world of ‘The Troubles’ in Belfast. My family were put out of our house at gunpoint in 1971, two uncles were murdered in sectarian attacks, and we squatted as a family in a house on ‘The Peace Line’ – the Crumlin Road. There were three bombs placed outside the house, the IRA took the family hostage twice – the first hostage taking resulting in a cousin being killed in cross-fire between the IRA and the British soldiers. 

Those experiences of the war in Northern Ireland gave me an interest in how human beings can either evolve or not – all governed by the world of emotions. I realised that we are pulled into an emotional world of like or dislike, love or hate.

I started out with a career in financial services. It was fun. I loved those people I worked with. Then I studied for a Masters in Consciousness Studies and Transpersonal Psychology and found myself on silent retreats in Arizona, California and Canada. I sweated several times in ‘sweat lodges’ with Native Americans from the Sioux tradition, in an exploration of the meaning of life. 

Life had been kind to me as I lived in Oxford for twelve years with wonderful friends and neighbours, and then I took a head stagger and persuaded my husband to give up his job, sell our house in Oxford, give away all of our belongings and move to Mallorca with two suitcases and the cat Ziggy.

It was perhaps a mad thing to do. The first 18 months we lived in a house with no running water, no telephone, no TV, no internet and then we moved into an olive grove between the Port of Soller and Soller in Mallorca and it was there that I wrote my first two novels Eden Burning and The Secret Wound. My husband and I moved into a house in the town of Soller and I wrote The Painter. 

I began to paint in Mallorca learning from an Argentinian painter Carlos Gonzalez. I travelled to more than 40 countries in the world and take my inspiration for writing from experiences in Belfast during ‘the Troubles’ and my travels with working with leadership and exploring with others emotional intelligence.

All those studies didn’t help prevent me from getting mugged in Madrid, Seville and Rome and being shot in Granada. I haven’t even begun to talk about those ghostly poltergeist activities. Why did the gate open in the middle of the night in the olive grove? Who was there? You can see where that scene appears in The Painter.