Tom Phelan is the author of the acclaimed novels Nailer, The Canal Bridge, In the Season of the Daisies, Iscariot, and Derrycloney.
He has also written for Newsday, the Irish Echo, Independent.ie, and the Recorder, the journal of the American Irish Historical Society. He is a 2008-2009 Fellow of the Christopher Isherwood Foundation.
Born and raised on a farm in Strahard, Mountmellick, County Laois, in the Irish midlands, Phelan now makes his home in New York.
Nailer, Phelan's latest novel, about a man determined to get justice–or revenge–is set against the backdrop of Ireland's abusive industrial schools and the collusion between state and church that allowed them to flourish.
The Canal Bridge, Phelan’s powerful novel of Ireland in the First World War, tells the story of two Irish soldiers (and the women and families they leave behind) as they struggle to survive the slaughterhouse that was Europe. A quarter of a million Irish men joined the British army and fought in the trenches in the First World War, and nearly fifty thousand died.
Tom Phelan's first novel, In the Season of the Daisies, tells of the 1921 IRA murder of a young boy and the effects on his surviving twin and on the men who witnessed the killing. In the Season of the Daisies was chosen for the "Discover Great New Writers" series sponsored by Barnes & Noble and was a finalist for the Discover Great New Writers Award.
Phelan's widely praised novel Iscariot is the story of an expatriate ex-priest who returns to Ireland to face the past and stumbles across the suspicious circumstances surrounding the death of a young woman.
In the humorous novel Derrycloney, Phelan presents a tale of life in the Irish countryside in the 1940s. Phelan calls it his "fanfare for the common man and woman" of his childhood.
