Niamh Murphy
I have always loved making books.
When I was a child I would spend hours and hours patiently cutting up paper, folding, gluing, and stapling the sheets in order to turn my stories into books for my friends. There was nothing I enjoyed more than telling stories, writing little plays, or making up new ‘imagination games.’ They would always involve an adventure of some kind, sometimes we were lost in an epic maze and had to find out way out, other times we were outlaws living in the forest and running from dangerous sentries on horseback.
Growing up in rural Wales gave me so much inspiration to fuel my imagination. There were dry-stone ruins hidden away in the woods, a great mysterious tower on the hill, fairy tale castles, and great mountains of dark slate. Not to mention the Welsh myths of dragons and knights we would be told in our school assemblies.
There was nothing I enjoyed more than reading, writing, and acting, but I struggled with school. At around the age of fourteen, I began to have trouble reading, finishing my work, and even staying awake. I was often too tired to make the journey to class and skipped days became skipped weeks which turned into skipped terms.
For the next five years, I struggled to do anything and most days I was unable to get out of bed, I even had to be home-schooled during my GCSE’s. I lost all my friends simply because I was very rarely able to leave the house. All I could do was retreat into my imagination. I played out stories in my head of knights on adventures, journeys into space, pirates, time-travellers, superheroes, samurais, other worlds, and different dimensions.
Places that I could only explore in my mind.
It took years to diagnose, but I was eventually told I had M.E. (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and although there is no cure, just knowing what I had meant that I could start my journey toward a recovery. Even though I was very ill for a very long time, all I wanted to do was to complete my education and I didn’t want my illness to hold me back. Even though it took me twice as long as everyone else I eventually managed to get my five A-Levels and was accepted into UCL, one of the top universities in the world, to study Medieval Archaeology and History.
After graduating I got a ‘real job’ in the city of London. I wore a suit every day and worked over sixty hours a week with horrible colleagues, nasty customers, and belligerent clients. I hated every single minute of it. It wasn’t long before those sixty hour weeks made me ill again. This time I gladly gave up my job and flat so I could go back to my hometown of Colchester and recover without the stress of having a City Job. It was a wrench at the time because I really believed that the only way to success was to work my way up the corporate ladder but looking back now I realise that it was the best decision I ever made.
It was during these long months of recovery, often too ill to leave my bed, that I retreated into my imagination. I remembered all the stories I created in my teens, and all those games my friends and I used to play when I was a child. It was then I knew that when I ever recovered, I would write these stories down.
I had decided that I wanted to become a writer.