About Dave

I began my arts career as a storyteller in Dublin at nights like The Monday Echo and Milk & Cookies, before realising that it might be a good idea to try writing some of this stuff down.

From then, it was submitting to journals and anthologies, getting rejections, and then occasionally getting accepted by nice places like Bare Hands, the Stinging Fly and The Quotable.

In 2013 I won the Fantasy Book Review Short Story Prize, which was lovely, and I’ve had short stories short-listed for the Hennessy New Writing Award and the Bath Short Story Prize. I graduated from the UCD Creative Writing Masters with the first chapter of what would become Knights of the Borrowed Dark and signed with rockstar agent Clare Wallace of the Darley Anderson Children’s Agency soon after.

Since then, I’ve released the second two books in the KOTBD trilogy, written Doctor Who books for the BBC, and written plays and TV and music videos and RPGs . I teach creative writing at UCD, currently serve as DCU’s Artist in Residence, and have travelled to more than nine hundred schools and libraries all over the world to talk about writing, mental health, and monsters. I also have two new series coming in 2025.

Follow me on Twitter at @d_ruddenwrites or on TikTok at @daveruddenwrites