AUTHOR PROFILE
S. A. DUNPHY
Margaret James talks to the Irish author about his two literary personae as a novelist and author of non-fiction
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A. (Shane) Dunphy is currently head of the Social Care Department at Waterford College of Further Education, and is a regular contributor to newspapers, television and radio in Ireland. So he leads a busy life away from writing, but somehow he still manages to keep up with the demands of his readers, both as S. A. and Shane.
‘As I was growing up, my mother was extremely encouraging about my writing,’ he explains. ‘I wrote my first story when I was seven. The Monster from the Green Lagoon was based on what I thought a Godzilla movie might be like, and in my story a group of friends and I went to a pond like one near where we lived, only to find an enormous monster looming out of it.’
He hasn’t stopped writing since.
‘One of my most recent novels, written as Shane Dunphy, is The Helpdesk,’ he says. ‘It’s about a lawyer who loses a file on the biggest deal of his life and calls the IT helpdesk to help him retrieve it. A woman answers the phone and helps him locate all the missing pages. They strike up a relationship, meet for a date, and spend the night together. But the lawyer is married and, deciding the whole thing was a mistake, after their night of passion he ghosts the lady.