Gisèle Scanlon

Gisèle Scanlon (born 7 November 1976) is an award-winning Irish author, activist and former President of Trinity Graduate Students’ Union. In recognition of her service to the student population, Scanlon received the 'Spirit of Trinity’ award in 2018. 
A three-time master’s student at Trinity College, her most recent campaigning championed causes such as the closure of the Science Gallery and lobbying on behalf of environmental causes, namely co-managing the protection of a red-listed bird breed in Trinity College Dublin during the pandemic. 
In October 2021 she co-led postgraduate and mature Trinity students in a protest to Dáil Éireann criticising the provisions in the government's budget as lacking consideration for mature, postgraduate and PhD students, and also highlighed the lack of mental health resources at the College. In the same month, she was the first to voice her concern at a proposal by Trinity College Dublin to build a structure on College Park sports grounds to house an exhibition which would sit on the site for three years. Scanlon launched a petition to save College Park from being built on which was signed by thousands of students and staff. The petition, having garnered around 3,000 signatures and supported by Trinity’s associated sports clubs, spoke of how the proposed exhibition would interfere with access to sports facilities for the mental health of students due to the loss of home games, training grounds and green space and the impacted sustainability factor and destruction of Trinity’s heritage. The campaign was ultimately successful and plans to build on College Park were scrapped by Trinity in February 2022. 
In November 2021 she co-wrote an open-letter as a postgraduate alongside Chairperson of Students4Change László Molnárfi seeking urgent intervention to protect the mental and physical health of students scheduled to sit in-person exams during the pandemic. The letter was signed by over 5,000 students and staff from colleges around Ireland and was delivered in December 2021 to the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science. 
In March 2022, she was amongst those leading on-campus groups who opposed fee increases with success. She has attracted controversy in the past, relating to alleged procedural irregularities with how her union's meetings were run during the Covid-19 pandemic.
=== Early Life and Education ===
Gisèle Scanlon was born on November 7, 1974 in Lisselton, Ballydonoghue, Listowel, Co. Kerry, and grew up there, the eldest of three children. Her parents, Marie (née Kelliher) is a teacher and her father Michael Scanlon is a farmer. 
 
Scanlon writes about being raised in a house steeped in literature, dance, theatre and music with a simple and sustainable lifestyle. Her upbringing was humble, she writes in The Goddess Guide that “we shared one room; my parents, my brother and sister and me in my grandparents’ house until I was ten and we moved to the new house which my parents saved hard to build. My father had an acre or two and we didn’t qualify for a house from the Council. I had the happiest childhood out in nature, like all children in the country, I learnt to swim in the sea.” Of her childhood years in Kerry, Scanlon wrote: "The opportunity that a rural life offered — to experience a culture of mutual respect for nature — became an integral part of my world view, and a basis for the values that I hold most dear." Scanlon has also written and talked about her reading material during her childhood and the importance of the local library to "raise questions of what the world was." She was accidentally given John Berger’s Ways of Seeing to take home from the library as a child, which she says changed her perspective. 
Scanlon attended the Coolard National School. She cites teachers Kathleen Baker and Maurice O’ Mahoney and her parents as key influences on her and writes about “learning Yeats at home and at school from the beginning.” Ballylongford born poet Brendan Kennelly and local Listowel writers Bryan McMahon and John B. Keane also had a huge influence on her and welcomed her into their homes, helping her to progress and write plays.
Scanlon later went to a boarding school to see if she could get a better tuition. She was educated in every subject in the Irish language at Coláiste Íde in Dingle and transferred after three years to Tarbert Comprehensive. She started but did not complete an undergraduate degree in English in UCD. During her time there, she discussed in an interview about being attacked on the Belfield campus, which left her feeling unsafe, causing her to cut short her undergraduate degree. She explained that she “didn’t want to be in a situation where there is no Michael”. Michael Byrne, Old Man Belfield stepped in to save her from an attacker on a rainy night as she was making her way to a rehearsal for a play. Since that day she has always “prioritised safety for everyone on campus”.
=== Writing Career ===
 
Scanlon highlighted the difficulty of starting out seeking employment and the discrimination she experienced as an administrator on a temporary contract: “If the coffee wasn’t the right colour, I’d get screamed at”, she said. Scanlon got a job as an advertising executive in a publishing company shortly thereafter and spent her first year at Smurfit Communications in that department. She got her big break as a writer when EGAN and Peter McKenna at Smurfit moved her to a full scholarship to profile the Irish designer at London Fashion Week for Irish Tatler. She worked hard to establish herself in the industry and spent more than a decade working as a freelance culture critic, becoming an art critic for the Irish Independent and a culture writer for the Irish Times. She has features in The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Vogue, The Irish Independent, CARA and Condé Nast Traveler and The Guardian. She has travelled and lived in Paris, New York and London. 
 
In 2004 Scanlon returned to Dublin and began to gather what she had learnt from her travels for a book. In 2006 her non-fiction book The Goddess Guide was published and garnered critical acclaim and international commercial success. She explored the simplicity of her family background in Kerry, the mainspring of much of her non-fiction in The Goddess Guide. It is a part memoir, part meditation on sustainability, and part conversation between consumer culture and the fashion and beauty industry - which she worked in - and the Irish tradition which she missed when working abroad. One critic explained that The Goddess Guide was Instagram in a book before Instagram. Her books are widely recognised as having expanded the notion of what non-fiction can do – what kind of stories it can tell concurrently, and how it can tell them. Scanlon wrote two-books in the non-fiction Goddess series, published in 2006 The Goddess Guide and 2018 The Goddess Experience. The books were published by HarperCollins in the UK and William Morrow in the US and won An Post Irish Book award and two awards for writing from the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences (IADAS) in the UK. She she was subsequently made an honorary European Executive member and judge of IADAS. An International organization, IADAS selects the nominees and winners for the Webby Awards and the Lovie Awards – the leading honours for the Internet and individual achievement and best practices in technology and creativity. Scanlon's books have sold over one million times.
=== Trinity College Dublin ===
After earning two English Literature masters degrees from the School of English in Trinity College, Scanlon joined the Trinity College Irish Art Research Centre (Triarc) in the School of History and Humanities to earn a third masters in Art History and Architecture
Her journey into the College and the Arts began when she was just seven years old. Having written a short story, she journeyed with her parents from Kerry to Dublin to present the story to the Chief Librarian and Keeper of Keys in Trinity and describes the experience of walking under Front Arch and exploring the campus as magical.
It was as an adult, reading an essay by the writer John Berger in 2012, that Scanlon was reminded of her trip to Trinity at just seven years old, and with the encouragement of Brendan Kennelly and Seamus Heaney and her best friend she applied in 2015. Scanlon went on to pursue postgraduate studies in English at Trinity College Dublin at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing in 2016/17 whilst also auditing/sitting in on a second M.Phil in Irish Writing. Studying under the distinguished scholar Professor Emeritus of Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin Terence Brown, a prominent figure in Anglo-Irish Literature, Scanlon became increasingly engaged in examining the arts and politics.
 
Scanlon described her first lecture with Brown in Trinity with nostalgia, emphasising how Trinity presents an environment cultivated for the appreciation of literature.
Category:1976 births
Category:Irish authors