My writing puts women’s lives and experiences centre stage, often focusing on female agency and women’s resistance to abuse and oppression. I frequently explore issues of loss but with an underlying optimism that it is possible to overcome trauma and abuse. My first novel, Golddigger, spans the Great Famine and the California gold rush. It won the Golden Crown Literary Society prize for historical fiction in 2016. I have finished a second historical novel which I hope will be published in the next year. I am currently completing my third historical novel, As a Lover, as part of my AHRC funded PhD in Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre. My childhood memoir, Funny Peculiar, was published in 2008 under the name Constance McCullagh. I have also written four plays.

I have been a member of Women Aloud NI since it started and became Chair in August 2020.

You can hear about my work in the Women Aloud NI Tea and A Yarn podcasts, hosted by Vicky McFarland, available at: https://anchor.fm/women-aloud-ni/episodes/Tea-and-A-Yarn-Episode-1---Hilary-McCollum-part-one-ern6n0.

You can follow me on twitter @hilarymcc7 and on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/hsmccollum