Emer McLysaght

Aisling began as a joke on Facebook. Emer McLysaght and Sarah Breen, who met in 2003 studying media at Ballyfermot College of Further Education in Dublin, built a group around a recognisable type of Irish woman, sensible and thrifty and forever heading home to the country at the weekend. Membership passed 45,000 and Gill Books commissioned a novel. Oh My God, What a Complete Aisling followed in 2017, The Importance of Being Aisling in 2018 and Aisling Ever After in 2023, and the series took Irish Book Awards for popular fiction in 2018, 2019 and 2021. McLysaght, from Kill in County Kildare and born in 1980, reached fiction by way of news: reporter and newsreader at Kfm, a spell at Newstalk, news editor at Phantom 105.2, then TheJournal.ie, and the editor's chair at TheDailyEdge.ie, which she left in 2017 to write full time. She holds a first-class media production degree from Dublin City University and a master's in international relations, writes a column for The Irish Times, and has spoken publicly about her treatment for an eating disorder in early 2020.