Twelve-year-old Fiona goes for gold with debut novel

Twelve-year-old schoolgirl Fiona Buckley will be hitting the books as usual next Friday — but on a grander scale. She’ll be reading from her newly-published novel as part of Listowel Writers’ Week.

The young author took on the project after a suggestion by her teacher and principal Cyril Lovett at Ballyvongane National School near Coachford, Co Cork, last summer, who had seen her growing talent for story-writing. Before mum Grett and dad Gerard even realised how seriously she had taken the task, she had 3,000 words of what has become Better than Gold were typed up on the computer at home.

Mr Lovett was so impressed when the school reopened that he approached the publishers, who have helped turn what started as a summer project into a book that is now available to buy online for reading devices or from bookshops.

“It was one thing seeing it at home on the computer screen but it was something else completely when they handed it to me as a real printed book a few weeks ago, I couldn’t believe it,” said Fiona, a sixth-class pupil from Aghinagh near Macroom.

As part of National Children’s Literary Festival running in tandem with the Listowel event, Fiona is equally nervous and excited about reading to an audience of eight to 12-year-olds at Scoil Íosagáin in Ballybunion next Friday morning. At the same Authors in Schools session will be another of publisher Emu Ink’s young writers, Dubliner Joe Prendergast, who gives profits from his books to cancer research at the Dublin hospital where his late father was treated, and whose Young Person of the Year Award last September prompted the approach to the book company.

Just like her book, the story of Fiona’s school dates back to the Famine era when it first opened in 1845, a period covered in her class last year in tandem with The Gathering. It describes the woes of an Irish family hit hard by the potato crop failure, their struggles and forced emigration, and it highlights the value of family and friends

In that same spirit, profits will go to Down Syndrome Ireland, which has been a big support to the family. Fiona’s nine-year-old brother John has Down syndrome.

“She decided any money from the sales should go to Tour de Munster, which gives fundraising proceeds to the six county branches, after a shoulder injury prevented her dad taking part in the cycle event which he did in 2011 and 2012,” said mum Grett, a Nuacht RTÉ journalist.

Before her big event in Kerry, Fiona gets to warm up her reading voice at Macroom library on Tuesday when another Cork writer, singer John Spillane, is lined up to launch Better than Gold.