call me Kev

I write stories. Mostly films, increasingly fiction, and occasionally biographies for websites that become much longer than intended.

I was born in London to Irish parents and raised from the age of six on the Northside of Cork City by a single “mum,” as she insisted on being called. I’ve been negotiating a slippery accent, a smart mouth and a blank page ever since.

I fell in love with films when I was four or perhaps five. They’re among my earliest memories. I began writing screenplays at nineteen and have since written about fifty original scripts, most of which fundamentally concern the wrong people for the story they’re in doing all the wrong things for the right reasons.

One of them became Grabbers, a comedy horror about an alien invasion of an Irish island whose inhabitants discover that staying drunk might keep them alive. It was filmed in Donegal during the winter of 2011 and released in 2012. It remains a good representation of who I am as a writer: funny, heartfelt, high-concept and all about character.

I also adapted several Neil Gaiman short stories for Likely Stories, an anthology series made for Sky Arts. The films featured a remarkable cast including George MacKay, Denise Gough, Tom Hughes, Monica Dolan, Johnny Vegas, Kenneth Cranham and Rita Tushingham.

Along the way, my work has received nominations from the Irish Film and Television Academy and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain. I was also associated, through a six-week rewriting job, with a Razzie-nominated Charles Dickens adaptation in which Raff Law did parkour as Oliver Twist and stole artwork for Michael Caine and Rita Ora. No career should be entirely predictable.

After twenty years of screenwriting, I began writing short stories and novels. Scripts taught me economy, structure and the value of getting into a scene as late as possible. Fiction has given me room to linger, digress and occasionally describe the weather. I adore the scope of it. I’m currently working on my second novel while hoping to have my first one published.

I think of myself as a storyteller before anything else. A handyman more than an artisan. I use the tools I have to build the things I want to see, and I don’t always know what the tools are called—only that this one is sharp, this one is heavy, and striking them together can sometimes make me laugh, cry or grin.

Ideas come from god knows where, but I try to write them as honestly and specifically as I can.

My favourite book is The Princess Bride. My favourite film is Superman: The Movie. Your first love is your first love. The film I saw too young that rewired my brain was Halloween. The one that confirmed I would abandon any hope of an uncomplicated life by wanting to make films was Jurassic Park, which I saw at eleven in the old Capitol Cinema in Cork. I practically levitated over the sticky carpet.

Stories kept me company as a child. Movies were waking dreams; books were movies I got to direct in my head. Both gave me somewhere else to go for a while. That remains part of what I hope to offer through my own work: escape, recognition and, where possible, a decent laugh.

Away from the page, I love getting away from my desk as much as possible. I’ve swum with sharks, dived on the Great Barrier Reef, jumped from planes and bungee-jumped more than once. Never again.

In the meantime, if you’re still curious, you can listen to me try and bug my best pal Will Collins — a superb writer of many Cartoon Saloon classics — on one of our two podcasts, be it Screen, Play where we take something topical and pick a top three, or The Best Bits where we pick our favourite scenes from randomly selected weirdly specific themes. Those are also labours of love.