Louise O’Neill author page

Louise O'Neill biography

Louise O’Neill is an Irish author from Clonakilty in west Cork. She studied English Studies at Trinity College Dublin and later completed postgraduate study in Fashion Buying at Dublin Institute of Technology. Before writing her first novel, she spent a year in New York working for Kate Lanphear, then senior Style Director of ELLE magazine.

Her novels Only Ever Yours and Asking For It brought issues including body image and consent into her fiction. Asking For It won Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards 2015. Only Ever Yours won Newcomer of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Bookseller YA Prize.

Only Ever Yours by Louise O’Neill was the first winner of the YA Book Prize in 2015. The book is about sixteen-year-olds freida and isabel in their final year of school as they wait to learn whether they will be selected as wives to powerful men.

The Surface Breaks: a Reimagining of The Little Mermaid is her retelling of Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tale. Scholastic published the hardback edition on 3 May 2018, with Anna Dittmann as illustrator and an upper-teen readership range of 14–20 years.

Her later books include After the Silence and Almost Love. Whatever Happened to Madeline Stone? was published as a Kindle edition on 9 April 2026.