Sarah is from Dalkey, and went to study English and History of Art at Trinity College. She worked in the book trade for several years, and wrote her first children's book, Kids Can Cook, in 1995. Sarah lives in Dublin with her partner Ben and children, Sam (12), Amy (3) and Jago (1). She has written seven novels for adults, and the latest one, When the Boys are Away, has just been released, and went straight into the charts at number two.

Sarah on Martina

Martina and I first met in 2001 at a Readers' Day event organised by Dublin City Library. Martina was giving a workshop, and my first impression of her was that she was very glamorous, with her long strawberry-blonde hair. We met again when we contributed to a charity book for Barnardo's called Irish Girls About Town in 2002. We went for dinner after that, and realised that we lived in the same part of Dublin, so our friendship began to grow from there.

One of the things we like to do most is go walking, and I think part of our connection is that we're both full-time writers, and a writer's life can be a lonely one at times. I don't always want to be boring my poor partner Ben about covers and publishers the whole time, but Martina is genuinely interested because it's her business as well, and we can swap stories about it.

It's great to have someone who can empathise when you come up against problems in writing. We have a broader spectrum of writer friends called the 'Irish Girls', who include Marita Conlon-McKenna, Tina Reilly and Denise Deegan, and we meet up for drinks and lunches on a regular basis, which is really nice.

Martina is very interested in people, and is highly intelligent and bright, and I love listening to her talk about things.

She's very socially aware and hates injustice, and she writes very articulately about current affairs like the hospital situation in her columns. I think she's the voice of many people, and I admire the way she will take a stand, if she doesn't like something that is going on.

She wrote a book called The Hollow Heart, about her own experiences with IVF. She was so honest and I was worried for her, because it meant a huge imposition on her life. She literally got thousands of phone calls and emails afterwards, and she answered every single one of them. The fact that I have children doesn't make any difference to our friendship, and Martina is wonderful with my children. She was up to visit when Amy was literally a couple of hours old, which I'm sure, must have been a bittersweet moment for her.

Martina's life is very busy at present, because she's helping to look after her mum in Omagh who had a stroke, but we keep in touch the whole time by phone and email. She's very caring about her family and friends, and would be the first to offer to step in if there was something wrong.

Martina on Sarah

When I first met Sarah, I felt that I had known her for a long time already, which is probably why we became friends. Sarah is from an academic family from Dalkey, and I grew up in Omagh, where my dad was a bus driver, but while our backgrounds were a world apart, it has made no difference at all to our friendship. Sarah just felt very familiar to me, and we clicked instantly.

One thing we have in common is that we're both very interested in current affairs, I think it's very easy to pigeonhole women into one category or the other . . . you're either pink and fluffy, or black and serious, and I think many women are both pink and black, and I see a lot of that in myself and Sarah.

She's very glamorous, and we both love sparkly jewellery and hairgrips and gorgeous new handbags, but we also get worked up about global warming and the lack of hospital beds.

I hadn't yet met Sarah while I was going through IVF, but she was so supportive when I wrote The Hollow Heart, and in the aftermath, because although I had worked in the media for a long time, I was astonished at the really invasive questions journalists asked me. Sarah's a wonderful mum, but she has never gone down the road where motherhood is her complete alpha and omega . . . there are loads of other aspects to her life as well. We are both very close to our families, and my little niece Sophie plays with her daughter Amy.

Sarah's a very inclusive person, and brings new people into the group all of the time. She's well able to talk, but she's also a really good listener. She has three young children, as well as a fulltime writing career, and I'm in awe of her organisational skills. She has this very unusual quality in that she is able to be gently assertive and take control of a situation without coming across as strident, which is quite hard for women to do, without being tagged as 'bossy'.

I piggyback off Sarah shamelessly, because I'm getting to be mildly antisocial, and would sometimes rather stay in with some chocolate and a glass of wine and watch a DVD. Sarah forces me to come out and go to places, and she literally turns up on the doorstep and pours me into the car, and I always end up enjoying myself. She likes driving, and I like being driven, so it's a match made in heaven! Her partner Ben, and my boyfriend David, get on really well together, which is very nice for us, because it means we can all go out together.