Joanne Carroll is the author of the best-selling novel The Italian Romance
and the critically-praised novellas In the Quietness of My Aunt's House
and Bad Blood
"I can only say that I was left quietly astonished and delighted by Carroll's writing,
which has some of the power and poise of William Trevor's."
The Australian, Weekend Review
NEWS: My best-selling novel, The Italian Romance, is now available in ebook format. Click on link:
http://www.amazon.com/Italian-Romance-Joanne-Carroll/dp/070223513X/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371494164&sr=1-12&keywords=The+Italian+Romance
LATEST: Read my article on the novelist and war. 'The Unblooded Author' was published in Griffith Review and can be viewed in pdf on their site at:
http://griffithreview.com/edition-17-staying-alive/the-unblooded-author
Joanne Carroll was born in Sydney, Australia and has lived in Ireland for many years.
" In my early twenties, after three years working as a print journalist, I left Australia to travel. With vague notions of writing books, I intended to find some beautiful spot in Italy and settle there for a few years. Almost accidentally I ended up in Ireland instead and here I have stayed for most of my life, with occasional forays 'home'. Most of my great adventures have happened here. In the spirit of my generation, I suppose, I came to the conclusion that writing about life was a cop-out and I wanted to engage on a different level. I began to work in a variety of fields, nurses' aide in a TB and cancer hospital, a full-time volunteer in a homeless agency, housemother to young people with intellectual handicaps, producer of Talking Books for the blind. Eventually I realised that writing was my best bet after all and I apprenticed myself to the task, a serious enterprise as any writer knows. Fiction became my chosen vehicle. The life of any human being is profound and of ultimate value. It is the novelist's task to struggle with expression of this truth."