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Congratulations to Lia Mills: Award of Honorary Doctorate 24th June 2016

The School of Dental Science and Dublin Dental University Hospital are delighted to announce the award, by Trinity College Dublin, of an Honorary Doctorate to Lia Mills, on Friday 24th June 2016.
Lia Mills is a novelist who also writes short stories and essays. She teaches creative writing in a variety of settings and has worked on several public art commissions.  In 2006, she was diagnosed with and treated for an advanced squamous cell carcinoma in her cheek and gums.  Afterwards, she published a memoir of the experience, In Your Face. Subsequently, she joined forces with interested professionals and other patients to form a committee, which would initiate a campaign to raise public awareness of mouth cancer.  The resulting Mouth Cancer Awareness Campaign is now entering its seventh year.

Lia started out as an Arts student in UCD, but switched to Radiography.  She trained in St Thomas’s Hospital (London) and worked in the Mater (Dublin). During ten years living in the US she went back to college and completed an undergraduate degree in Behavioural Science (Lesley College, Boston).  When Lia and her family came home, she did a Master’s degree in Women’s Studies and worked in the Women’s Education, Research and Resource Centre in UCD  for the next ten years, teaching at undergraduate and postgraduate levels.  During this time she published her first novel, Another Alice. She left UCD to become a full-time writer, completing another Master’s in Screenwriting at DIADT,  before going on to publish another novel, Nothing Simple.  The following year, Lia was diagnosed with mouth cancer, which led to her memoir, In Your Face, and her subsequent involvement in the Mouth Cancer Awareness Campaign. With Dr Denise MacCarthy, she co-edited Word of Mouth: Coping With and Surviving Mouth, Head and Neck Cancers,a collection of stories and articles written by patients and professionals involved in their care. 

Lia’s most recent novel, Fallen (Penguin Ireland) is the UNESCO Dublin: One City, One Book selection for 2016. For the first time, Dublin and Belfast have come together for a Two Cities One Book festival, involving Dublin City Libraries and Libraries Northern Ireland.  The festival is also part of the national 1916 Centenary Programme: http://www.dublinonecityonebook.ie/
Currently writer-in-residence at Farmleigh House and Arts Council Writer Fellow at UCD,  Lia continues to write and to teach creative writing.

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