Elizabeth Boyle

Elizabeth Boyle was born in Dublin, grew up in Suffolk and returned to live in Dublin in 2013. She is a medieval historian specialising in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of Ireland and Britain. A former Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Cambridge, she now works in the Department of Early Irish at Maynooth University. Fierce Appetites is her debut collection of personal essays.

In 2020, just before the world was turned upside down, Elizabeth Boyle found herself experiencing three of life’s greatest sureties – grief, heartbreak and aging. And so, as she struggled to come to terms with the death of her father, the end of a relationship and turning 40, she looked outside herself and realised that these and so many of life’s big events have been used as inspiration for years – since medieval times in fact. Which set Elizabeth, who is a medieval historian with special interest in the intellectual, literary and religious culture of Ireland and Britain, off on a journey of discovery as she examined her own life against the themes that have pervaded Ireland for centuries. Fierce Appetites is a memoir that mixes ancient stories with modern tales of addiction, grief, motherhood, sex, class and travel as Boyle makes sense of her own failings, works through her grief and questions her place in the world.

“Really REALLY good”
Siobhán McSweeney

“Boyle has the skill to move us between the raw and the refined, the mind and the body, the past and the present, the mundane and the marvellous without ever losing control of her dark materials”
Fintan O’Toole

“Just as brilliant and hard to define as everyone says it is. You should read it. You will both learn things and be entertained”
Jan Carson

“An eloquent plea for the value of curiosity and the life of the mind, standing up the robustness of scholarship against the frailty of individuals, the resilience of myth against brittle daily preoccupations. It’s an agile story, irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising: like nothing else you will read”
Hilary Mantel

Deanna O’Connor is a founding member of the organising committee of the Dingle Literary Festival. She is an award-winning magazine editor who now freelances for corporate clients, working from the inspiring office space at Dingle Creativity and Innovation Hub. She also writes regularly for the Sunday Business Post. She is the founder of The Speak Up Club, a social enterprise working to empower women as leaders in business and the community.ge