Dennis O’Donnell
Dennis O’Donnell was born in Bathgate, West Lothian in 1951. He still lives in the West Lothian hinterland. He is very married - in fact, since 1972.
He has been a teacher, a joiner’s labourer and, in his youth, a chicken catcher. Nowadays he’s too old to catch chickens and too wise to be a teacher. He has also been a columnist for The Scotsman. He is currently in psychiatry - on the nursing side.
He has had two collections of poetry published by Curly Snake Press - Two Clocks Ticking (Winner of the Saltire First Book Award 1997) and Smoke & Mirrors (2003).
Books by Dennis O’Donnell
Redemption
John Newlands was born in Bathgate in 1737 and he died in Jamaica in 1799. Little else of any substance is known, other than the fact that he left money in his will to endow a free school in the parish of Bathgate. This became, after many years of disputing the terms of the will, Bathgate Academy.
Newlands had made a fortune in Jamaica from slave-trading and sugar-planting. Every year in June, Bathgate celebrates the bequest with the annual Procession, formerly known as ‘Newlands Day’. When it rained on this festival, as it often did, the townspeople used to call it ‘darkies’ tears’. They were under no illusion about how Newlands had amassed his fortune.
Redemption is a novel based on those facts; a novel of encroaching evil in the vein of Heart of Darkness.
Dennis O’Donnell is represented at Jenny Brown Associates by Stan - .