Longford author and photographer looking forward to spending Christmas with family after year of highs and lows

Longford photographer and author Shelley Corcoran recently launched her book The Most Irish Person, a vivid portrayal of a multicultural Ireland, which was featured at the Dublin Book Festival. After a year of highs and lows, she got reminded what life is all about.

Speaking of her experience at the festival, Shelley said: “It was an amazing experience. I've never been part of it before so I was very excited. The children were really engaging. It was a girls school, so I read my book and then I asked them questions about their nationality and the different nationalities that might be in their school because that's what the book is about.”

In her book, Shelley portrays 17 nationalities - an idea she got after interacting with children in national schools for over 10 years.

"There are so many people from different nationalities that call Ireland home,” she says. “I don't know if there's going to be a follow-up on that topic. It was quite close to my heart because the way the book came about was because of my interaction with national school children and going into the schools and seeing all the different nationalities. I just thought it was wonderful that these children could just turn to their friends and ask them about their culture, their nationality, their country and find out about their traditions.”

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The photographer, who also has a love for literature and poetry, started writing again during lockdown.

“I suppose the writing side went a little bit quiet for a while, but then, especially during Covid, I ignited it again and started writing both poetry and children's stories and I haven't stopped since.

During lockdown, people started to explore ideas that have kind of been dormant in their mind, in their heart. Ideas that we’ve had since we were children, I suppose we were kind of given a little gift with lockdown.”

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This Christmas, Shelley plans on spending as much time with her family as possible. After a year of high and lows, she is grateful to be alive.

“It was a very crazy year for me because of the book launch, I had a huge success with it. But then, I had highs and I had lows. I was actually diagnosed with bowel cancer in February of this year. I went to chemotherapy and I finished that in September,” Shelley says.

“I’m just happy to be here, be alive, be able to spend time with my loved ones and I suppose I'll throw myself into writing more books because it is a passion of mine and life is so, so, so short. For me, Christmas is very much about family time. It’s nice to be able to take time out and realise what is important, what Christmas is really about,” she concludes.

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