Kevin Markham visits Porto and finds that golf is only one of the sweet things on offer

CAREER paths don’t always follow a linear route. Just ask social media star and bestselling author Melanie Murphy, who took a few years out after her Leaving Cert before deciding on what she wanted to study.

There was a time when people cast spells. They didn’t necessarily work, but people cast them.

Marian Keyes often uses a phrase that her grandmother used to say: “I don’t have the houlding out.”

JK Rowling has announced the launch of four new Harry Potter stories that will be made available from June 7.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid and The BFG are also among the books checked out most often.

All 20 of the most borrowed books were titles aimed at children with the Harry Potter series still proving hugely popular.

This is the full and unedited address by Father Martin Magill at the funeral of Lyra Catherine McKee in St Anne’s Cathedral Belfast this afternoon.

When he decided he just wasn't good enough to be a newspaper cartoonist, Jeff Kinney decided he had to find another way to get his illustrations published. It would be the origins of publishing phenomenon, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, he tells Rowena Walsh.

Mrs Hinch – aka Sophie Hinchliffe – is an internet sensation, famous for her super bubbly cleaning tips and her regular updates about her husband and imminent first child.

If you live your life resisting the pull of a steady job — because you value time more than money— you’ll be adept at fiscal ad libbing, writes Suzanne Harrington.

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Black ’47, out now - Revenge thriller set during the Irish Famine. Hugo Weaving, Barry Keoghan and Stephen Rea star.

How would any right-thinking person make this comparison, a week after five people were shot dead at the offices of the Capital Gazette newspaper in Annapolis, Maryland, writes Alison O'Connor

Your kids better know their Hippogriffs from their Herbology if they’re going to participate in fun-filled summer celebration of Harry Potter in a West Cork town.

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"Despite my inability to pay for the long-distance trips, the theme parks, or what-have-you, I’ve made up for by using my head and making attempts at being constructively creative with our time together."

Marian Keyes, Eimear McBride, and Edna O’Brien join JK Rowling and Harper Lee on a list of the 100 essential books by female writers from the past 100 years, according to a new poll.

Sales of Munster and Ireland rugby legend Paul O’Connell’s autobiography helped boost profits at O’Mahony Booksellers last year.

Esther N McCarthy offers some gift ideas for all the marvellous matriarchs this March

With the success of the Harry Potter series and David Walliams’s books, you might think writing for kids is easy. Think again, says Áilín Quinlan.

Irene Halpin Long meets a class of book lovers in Cork, and also chats to established authors about what they read as children.

JK Rowling has finally addressed her decision to cast Johnny Depp in  Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them: The Crimes Of Grindelwald.

Twenty years since the debut of JK Rowling’s ‘Harry Potter’ series, William A Gleason says it’s difficult to recall a day when audiences weren’t spellbound by the young wizard.

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SHEILA O’Flanagan has decamped to her summer home outside Alicante. But while the summer sun is pouring down outside, her mind is on a white winter.

The world of sport, with its seemingly endless capacity to invent and reinvent itself, has demonstrated time and again that there is nothing permanent, nothing resistant to transition.

Where does the time go?

JK Rowling’s books promote friendship, loyalty, courage, and learning, writes Colette Keane, who commends her for getting children excited about reading

Two decades after the first Harry Potter book, the spell is unbroken, says Jonathan deBurca Butler.

The couple had been trying to track down the student all week but were having no luck.

Here's hoping you find it, Jamal!.

Rowling, 51, has 10.3 million followers on the site and regularly shares her views on politics and human rights with them.

Characters such as Tracy Beaker might find themselves in difficult family situations, but that sense of reality is part of the appeal for Jacqueline Wilson’s millions of young readers as she gets set to publish her new novel, Wave Me Goodbye, writes Esther McCarthy.

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Shield your eyes from their magnificence, mortals!