Patrick was born in Blackpool, England in 1941 and brought up in Bangor, Northern Ireland. Patrick’s father was a physician. Patrick knew he wanted to be a doctor from the age of nine, when he was struck with polio. He said, “I was in hospital for three months and I was just so impressed with the doctors and the nurses. … And I never, never wavered.” He also began writing in his childhood.
Patrick studied and practised medicine in Belfast and rural Ulster. In 1969, he was working in Belfast and wrote his first short story about the Troubles “as a kind of cathartic thing” before immigrating to Canada in 1970 to work in the field of human infertility. He worked across Canada in the field and established an IVF clinic in Calgary, leading the team who produced Canada’s third test-tube baby. He has received three lifetime achievement awards in his field including the Lifetime Award of Excellence in Reproductive Medicine of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. He retired in 2001.
Throughout his academic and scientific career he contributed to over 170 academic publications and was the editor-in-chief of the Canadian Obstetrics and Gynaecology Journal. He also wrote several medical humour columns that led to him creating the character of Dr. Fingal Flahertie O’Reilly, the doctor in the Irish Country Stories.
Thanks to the prompting of his friend bestselling author Jack Whyte he attempted to write a novel. His first attempt didn’t go well (“It was 800 pages of landfill,” he says). Patrick eventually would publish his short stories about Northern Ireland’s Troubles in the volume Only Wounded in 1997. He followed that collection with two thrillers, Now and in the Hour of Our Death and Pray for Us Sinners.
It was while talking with his editor that the idea of developing a novel around the O’Reilly character came up. An Irish Country Doctor was subsequently published in 2004 and Patrick has written sixteen books in the Irish Country Books series as well as dozens of short stories featuring the characters from the books. His books have sold more than 2 million books worldwide and have been published in 13 languages.
Patrick lives on Salt Spring Island in British Columbia, Canada.
