Bridget McNulty

Contributor

Bridget McNulty is a published author, content strategist, writer, editor and speaker. She is the co-founder of two non-profits: Sweet Life Diabetes Community, South Africa's largest online diabetes community, and the Diabetes Alliance, a coalition of all the organisations working in diabetes in South Africa. She is also the co-founder of Now Novel: an online novel-writing course where she coaches aspiring writers to start - and finish! - their novels. Bridget believes in the power of storytelling to create meaningful change.

Biography:

Bridget completed her undergraduate studies in Creative Writing and Theatre at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, graduating in 2005.

Her first novel, Strange, Nervous Laughter, embodies elements of magical realism and was first published in South Africa by Oshun Books in September 2007.

In 2007, Bridget was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, an event that led to her involvement in diabetes advocacy. She co-founded both Now Novel and Sweet Life in 2012, with Sweet Life transitioning from a print magazine to the largest online diabetes community in South Africa, and an NGO that provides information and support to individuals with diabetes.

In 2009, her book Strange, Nervous Laughter was published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press. Her self-published book How to Live a Happy Life (with a Chronic Illness) in 2015 is an honest, heartfelt look at making the best of being chronically ill. In 2021, she published The Grief Handbook: A Guide Through the Worst Days of Your Life with Watkins Publishing in the UK, USA, and South Africa, prompted by her personal experiences of grief following the death of her mother in 2019.

She has worked for Real Simple Magazine South Africa and has been a regular contributor to many other newspapers, magazines and websites including The Oprah Magazine, Woman & Home, Mango Juice, Fresh Living, Fairlady, Cosmopolitan and ELLE. She was a book reviewer for the Sunday Times and interviewed authors for KZN Literary Tourism.

Her advocacy extends to television appearances, where she has discussed diabetes and its management on South African shows such as The Afternoon Express and The Expresso Show.

Find out more:

Recent posts

Why write a novel? Twitter tells us

Why is writing a book a dream for so many people, and so satisfying for others? There are a number of reasons... https://twitter.com/kseniaanske/status/385290609684008960 Writing a novel can be therapeutic: You get to talk about feelings that you might not ordinarily and get everything off your c...

October 7th, 2013

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Writing feedback: How to get helpful critiques

One of the challenges for us all as writers is getting good feedback on our writing, especially early in our career. You can get feedback for free or you can pay for it, and you can get it from peers or from professionals. To get feedback on your writing: Join an online writing group or foru...

September 23rd, 2013

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Writing memoir: Three things to learn from Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott wrote one of the most beloved writing book of all times, Bird by Bird, but she has also had great success as a writer of memoirs.  Writing memoir often means writing about family and other real people. Lamott's honesty and self-deprecating humour are instructive to any writer ...

September 17th, 2013

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Silence your inner critic: 8 ways to write in peace

So often beginning writers (and even established authors) tell themselves 'My writing is bad'. If you tend to criticize yourself to a creative standstill too, you're in good company: Even the great authors have suffered from self-doubt. The good news is that there are ways to silence your inner c...

September 3rd, 2013

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Turning notes into a novel

Most writers don’t sit down on day one of novel-writing and begin spinning a tale; generally, they’ve been outlining and making notes for a while. Turning notes into a novel, a publishable manuscript, can seem daunting. Despite this, the tips below will help you develop your notes into a book. Ho...

August 1st, 2013

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Dan Brown: 10 tips for writing bestselling suspense

Dan Brown, author of The Da Vinci Code among other books, is one of the top-selling authors of all time. What can aspiring authors learn from his success? Plagiarism scandals aside, Dan Brown's global publishing success garnered endless publicity. The linguist Geoffrey Pullum called Brown on...

July 31st, 2013

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