Felicity Hayes-McCoy was born in Dublin, Ireland, and graduated in English and Irish from UCD in the 1970s. She then built a successful UK-based career as an actress and writer, working in theatre, music theatre, radio, TV, and digital media. As well as the successful Finfarran series of novels, she is the author of two memoirs, The House on an Irish Hillside (Hodder & Stoughton 2012, UK) and A Woven Silence: Memory, History & Remembrance, and of Enough Is Plenty:The Year on the Dingle Peninsula, a lifestyle book illustrated with her own photographs. (The Collins Press 2015, Ireland), She and her husband Wilf Judd divide their time between London and Ireland. With him she wrote Dingle And Its Hinterland: People, Places and Heritage (The Collins Press 2017, Ireland).