Born in Salford to Italian parents, Juliet Bresson moved to Galway as a young child and grew up in what was then "a tiny little road with grass growing down the middle": Clybaun.

Juliet Bressan. Picture:Paula Geraghty.

"We got our water through a pump from the stream, it was like Inis Meáin, it was very remote. Clybaun was a Gaeltacht at the time, probably still is officially. It was really the back end of nowhere," she says, laughing.

"It was a lovely peaceful place, there were cows in the back garden and it was a great place to raise kids." When Juliet's father came here for a job teaching Italian in UCG, her grandparents followed and came to live in Barna.

At school in Taylor's Hill, Juliet says she was "never top of the class" but was clever at things like science.

"We were streamed at that time, so if you were good at science and things like that you were going to be a nurse or a doctor." Despite her talents at science, Juliet first discovered a love of writing during her first year of secondary school, when Ailish O'Brien "an amazing, intellectual woman", praised an essay of hers.

"At a time when girls weren't really expected to be clever, she was very inspiring. It was a bit like Mona Lisa Smile! She was the first teacher ever to say anything nice to me. She said something nice about an essay I'd done, and you know at that age, when someone says you're good at something you really begin to love it."

At the time, Juliet says, she "didn't know you could do that for a living".

"I didn't even know there was such a thing as a writer. I don't know where I thought books came from! I loved writing and I felt permanently unhappy when I wasn't doing it."

From Taylor's Hill, Juliet went to UCG to study medicine, which she says she found difficult. Working all night in a hospital with two small children to raise was a challenge that left her exhausted and stressed.

"I was good at it, and I liked it, but I'd be crying in the loo when I was meant to be in Outpatients."

In one rare opportunity she had to write in the height of it all during the early 1990s, she poured it all out in an essay on "what it's like to be absolutely creased and work and trying to raise two kids". Nowadays it would probably be a chick-lit bestseller, but it never occurred to her to get it published.

"Nowadays there is a whole literature attached to that, there were obviously a lot of women who felt that way."

From about 1998, Juliet began to write columns and opinion pieces for medical journals, which she really enjoyed. A few early attempts at serious writing "went nowhere" but in 2006 she had her eureka moment.