Her award-winning YA novels highlight health issues
Author Jenny Ireland pictured at The Observatory, Grand Central Hotel, Belfast. Photo: Marie Therese Hurson/PressEye
Jenny Ireland remembers her husband Chris visiting her in hospital and reading Sally Rooney’s Normal People aloud to her on the ward. “He had to censor it,” Ireland says with a smile. When we meet to chat in Belfast’s Grand Central hotel, Chris is discretely stationed a few tables away, working on a laptop. “I rely on him a lot,” she says.
At 23, Ireland developed swelling in her knees, elbows and neck and was diagnosed with psoriatic arthritis, a chronic disease that causes joints to swell and stiffen. In 2019 she had brain surgery for encephalitis, spending five weeks in hospital – first in intensive care, a high dependency unit and then a public ward.