Hilary McCollum is a novelist, playwright and feminist activist. Her first novel, Golddigger, which spans the California goldrush and the Irish Famine, won the Golden Crown Literary Society award for historical fiction in 2016. Her second novel, Wild, set within the British suffragette movement, will be published in 2018. In 2014, her play, Life and Love: Lesbian Style, was nominated for best original writing at the International Dublin Gay Theatre Festival and won the best female performance award. She has written two verbatim plays about LGBT lives in northwest Ireland and a lesbian pirate play, The Pirates of Portrush, which was developed with the support of the Arts Council NI and the Big Lottery. She is currently working at Queen’s University Belfast on a novel set within 1920s London and Paris.