Nicola Monaghan
Encyclopedia
Monaghan was listed in The Independent
The Independent
The Independent is a British national morning newspaper published in London by Independent Print Limited, owned by Alexander Lebedev since 2010. It is nicknamed the Indy, while the Sunday edition, The Independent on Sunday, is the Sindy. Launched in 1986, it is one of the youngest UK national daily...
’s New Year 2006 list of rising talent, and won a Betty Trask Award
Betty Trask Award
The Betty Trask Prize and Awards are for first novels written by authors under the age of 35, who reside in a current or former Commonwealth nation. The awards were established in 1984 by the Society of Authors, at the bequest of the late Betty Trask, a reclusive author of over thirty romance novels...
, the Author's Club Best First Novel Prize and the Waverton Good Read Award
Waverton Good Read Award
The Waverton Good Read Award was founded in 2003 by villagers in Waverton, Cheshire, England, and is based on Le Prix de la Cadière d'Azur, a literary prize awarded by a Provençal village. Adult debut novels written by UK residents and published in the previous twelve months are eligible for...
for her debut. Her second novel Starfishing and novella The Okinawa Dragon came out in 2008. She has also had stories published in anthologies and magazines, including Sunday Night and Monday Morning (Five Leaves), Cool Brittania (Wachenbach) and online magazine Pulp.Net
Monaghan was the first fellow of The National Academy of Writing, which is based at the Birmingham City University
Birmingham City University
Birmingham City University is a British university in the city of Birmingham, England. It is the second largest of three universities in the city, the other two being the Aston University and University of Birmingham...
but left in 2009. She is currently a writer=in-residence for the charity First Story
First Story
First Story is a literary charity. It was founded in 2007 by Katie Waldegrave and the writer William Fiennes to improve literacy and foster creativity in young people through creative writing...
. Since September 2010 she has worked at the University of Nottingham
University of Nottingham
The University of Nottingham is a public research university based in Nottingham, United Kingdom, with further campuses in Ningbo, China and Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia...
running the Creative and Professional Writing BA course.
Reviews of The Killing Jar
- New Zealand Listener
- The Written Nerd
- East London and West Essex Guardian
- The Observer
- Mslexia
- The Independent
Starfishing
This is Monaghan’s second novel, and was published by Chatto and WindusChatto and Windus
Chatto & Windus has been, since 1987, an imprint of Random House, publishers. It was originally an important publisher of books in London, founded in the Victorian era....
in March 2008. It is based in the City of London
City of London
The City of London is a small area within Greater London, England. It is the historic core of London around which the modern conurbation grew and has held city status since time immemorial. The City’s boundaries have remained almost unchanged since the Middle Ages, and it is now only a tiny part of...
in the late 1990s and is about Frankie Cavanagh, a LIFFE futures trader, working and playing hard and trying to keep up with the boys. She starts an affair with her boss, Tom, and the two go down a destructive route together. The book is dark, with gothic overtones, and some very subtle references to Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley
Mary Shelley was a British novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus . She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley...
's Frankenstein
Frankenstein
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel about a failed experiment that produced a monster, written by Mary Shelley, with inserts of poems by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one. The first...
. As with Monaghan's previous work, the imagery is rich and very sensual, and the narrative fast paced. The story takes place as the financial world begins to be taken over by electronic trading
Electronic trading
Electronic trading, sometimes called etrading, is a method of trading securities , foreign exchange or financial derivatives electronically...
on screens and traders struggle to cope with this transition,