Paul McCracken

Northern Irish novelist, Paul McCracken was born on 16th January 1991 in the Ulster Hospital, Dundonald, just outside of Belfast. He grew up in the Castlereagh area of east Belfast where he also went to school.

Ever since he could hold a pencil, he wanted to be an artist and no one could tell him otherwise.

In the spring of 2011, he enrolled in a five-day film-making course through the Prince’s Trust charity. He always had a passion for storytelling. During the course, he impressed the owner of the studio at which the course was being held, through the raw creativity he displayed. The studio owner was the first to encourage Paul to write his own material, that material being screenplays. After leaving the course with newfound confidence and ambition, Paul started to learn the craft of screenwriting and got to work writing his very first feature film.

After securing full time work later that year, he found a renewed inspiration to write again and wrote a full length film script in the space of a week. Paul kept on writing other projects as well as continually editing the first script, but he kept the fact he was writing close to himself as he didn’t want to face any negativity if he were to tell anyone. The script would go on to score highly in an international screenplay competition, based out of Los Angeles. It would then place in the quarter-finals of the same competition for the next two years in a row, accompanied by another screenplay that Paul wrote next.

Years later, after entering competitions, pitching, submitting and doing some occasional freelance scriptwriting, Paul wanted to find a way to get his work into the public eye. Writing a novel was a challenge that seemed daunting but also exciting. Having first thought of converting his best script into a novel, he decided to come up with a completely original story.

In 2018, he self published his debut novel, Layla's Song.

Since 2020 he has secured four book deals with three different English publishers.