Awards and Publications
Fia and the Last Snow Deer has been named one of the top 20 Irish books from the last 20 years by public vote through the An Post Awards!
Most recently, Fia and the Last Snow Deer won the 2025 Great Reads Award (GRA)
and was the November, 2025 Waterstone's Book of the Month.
Fia was also shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal for both writing and illustration
2026
Eilish's second book, The Waters and the Wild, has been shortlisted for the 2026 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Award, which takes place in May, 2026.
Fia and the Last Snow Deer has also won the KPMG Children's Books Ireland Award and the Eilis Dillon Award, 2025.
In summer, 2025, Fia was longlisted for the Wainwright Children's Literature Prize and in September, won The Week Junior Prize in Children's Poetry.
In 2024, Fia and the Last Snow Deer was the winner of the An Post Book Award in the Senior Children's category, 2024 and was shortlisted for the overall An Post Irish Book of the Year.
In 2025, Eilish was awarded a place on the Live Literature Mentorship Programme with Laureate na NÓg Patricia Forde through the Irish Arts Council, Laureate na NÓg and Children's Books Ireland
Eilish's poetry has been published in Crannog Literary Magazine, Three Drops From a Cauldron, The Ogham Stone and Cailleach literary journals and in the anthology Writing Home; The ‘New Irish’ Poets, published by Dedalus Press.
In 2021, Eilish was awarded a Round One Literary Bursary from The Arts Council in Ireland and the Literary Bursary, Round Two in 2025
In summer 2020 she won second place in the Ken Saro-Wiwa Poetry Competition.
Eilish was awarded a place on the Words Ireland Mentoring Programme for young adult and children’s literature in 2020 with Carnegie Medal winner and verse novelist Sarah Crossan.
In 2018, Eilish's first (unpublished) children’s novel was shortlisted for the Mslexia Children’s Novel Award in 2018.
She received a master’s degree in early medieval Irish history and literature in 2002 and a doctorate in medieval English literature in 2006 from the National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
Eilish is involved in the Champion for Reading Programme with Children's Books Ireland and a member of the Discover Irish Kids Books Campaign.
Fia and The Last Snow Deer is illustrated by Dermot Flynn is published by Puffin Books, UK.
Eilish's second middle grade novel in verse, The Waters and the Wild, published by Puffin, UK, was released in September, 2025 and is illustrated by David Rooney
Eilish is represented by Joanna Moult at Skylark Literary agency. She lives in County Wicklow.
Three Drops
From
A Cauldron
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