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After a Dance is the compiled collection of short stories from acclaimed writer Bridget O''Connor, with an exclusive preface from the author''s daughter, Constance Straughan. Bridget O''Connor''s stories take the form of bold, bizarre, hilarious, and disturbing vignettes from lives lived on the fringes, usually in big city London where O''Connor herself lived for many years. Her often grotesque but always perfectly realized characters have bad, transactional sex and endure apocalyptic hangovers while attempting to establish a grip on their tenuous and treacherous surroundings as well as each other. Intimacy in its truest form as well as its most subversive is present throughout as O''Connor toys with the idea of what it really means to form bonds with the people around us. Violence, emotional and physical, is sudden and often inevitable in O''Connor''s world - but in amongst all the bleakness is a wicked and outrageous sense of humour, and there are delights to be found in her taut, twisty prose.
About the author
Bridget O’Connor was born in London in 1961, and began her career as a writer whilst working in a building-site canteen. In her spare moments she penned darkly comic and excruciatingly well-observed short stories, one of which, ‘Harp’, won the 1991 Time Out Short Story Prize. Two collections followed, Here Comes John and Tell Her You Love Her.
In 2001 her stage play The Flags was performed at the Manchester Royal Exchange before being produced in Liverpool, Dublin, Belfast, Slovenia, and Australia. Like so much of her writing, it was praised as much for being ‘sharp and gritty’ as for its ‘sublimely drawn’ characters and situations (The Guardian).
As a screenwriter, Bridget often worked with her husband, Peter Straughan, and their final screenplay together was the Oscar-nominated and BAFTA-winning Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. She once called herself a happy pessimist, and shining humour into dark corners was a speciality in her work and elsewhere.
Bridget died in 2010, and was survived by Peter and their daughter Constance.
