Christina McKenna

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Christina McKenna

Christina McKenna is an author who was born and grew up in Draperstown, County Londonderry, Northern Ireland. McKenna attended the Belfast College of Art where she obtained an honours degree in Fine Art and studied postgraduate English at the University of Ulster. In 1986, she left Northern Ireland and spent ten years teaching both these subjects in Madrid, Istanbul, and Milan.

McKenna was, at the same time, pursuing a successful career as a painter. She mounted several exhibitions of her work, both as a solo artist and in group context when abroad, but also on her return to Northern Ireland.

[edit] Publications

My Mother Wore a Yellow Dress is a memoir (2004 Neil Wilson Publishing, Glasgow, Scotland) that charts her struggle to make sense of the hidebound Catholicism of her childhood, and how art and poetry freed her to follow a more spiritual path. It also contains an exorcism which took place in the family home when she was eleven. Revisiting this episode served as the genesis for her next publication.

The Dark Sacrament (2006 Gill & Macmillan, Dublin,) co-authored with her husband, David M. Kiely, contains nine contemporary cases of exorcism in Ireland. A special American edition was published in October 2007 by HarperOne, San Francisco. It contains additional material.

The Misremembered Man is her first novel. Set in rural Northern Ireland in 1974, this tragi-comic work charts the progress of a lonely farmer in his attempts to find a wife. All the while he is pursued by dark ghosts from a terrible childhood of physical and sexual abuse. A screen adaptation is already in development by Hollywood producer, Robert Shapiro.^{[citation needed]}