About Senta Rich
Senta Rich is an award-winning screenwriter and novelist whose work spans television, film and fiction.
She began her career as an advertising copywriter, while also writing radio plays and articles for magazines, before moving into writing for film and television. Since then, she has built a career telling stories across the screen and the page, with a particular interest in character, relationships and the psychology that runs beneath them.
Senta is a two-time Writers Guild of Ireland Zebbie Award winner, receiving the award for Best Continuing Drama Script for her work on Fair City in both 2021 and 2026. She also has a feature film in development.
Her debut novel, Hotel 21, was published by Bloomsbury UK in 2023 and subsequently optioned for television by Orion TV (MGM), bringing Senta’s fiction and screenwriting worlds together.
Her second novel, The Single Neighbour, was published by Bloomsbury UK in June 2025 and is now available in paperback.
Senta holds a BA (Hons) in Philosophy from Liverpool University and has a longstanding interest in psychology, particularly Jungian psychology. This influence can be felt in her fascination with motivation, identity and the complicated inner lives of her characters.
Originally from London, Senta now lives in Dublin with her husband and son, where she continues to write for both page and screen.
About Hotel 21
“The idea for Hotel 21 came to me when I was staying in a small hotel in Lisbon and I accidentally annoyed the hotel cleaner. She wanted to get in to clean the room and I kept asking her to come back later. When I finally left, she was standing outside, arms crossed, giving me a dirty look. I felt terrible. When I got back that night… my hairbrush was missing.
Looking back, I most likely lost it in transit but at the time, I was convinced it was her – a ‘revenge steal’ for annoying her earlier. I was immediately intrigued and excited by this woman.
Who was she? Did she take things from hotel rooms a lot? Did she ever get caught? It also made me think how she had taken some control over me, perhaps to feel like she was getting control back over her life.
Two days later I wrote the first 4000 words of Hotel 21.”
About The Single Neighbour
Tristan and Izzy are on the brink of marital breakdown. Sex has become less than perfunctory and distance shadows their interactions. The arrival of their new neighbour may just be their salvation: or, will she be their undoing?
Vivacious, enigmatic and enticing, Viv piques both Tristan and Izzy’s interest, her appearance in their lives offering them diversion from their faltering marriage and a window into the people they might be were it not for each other.
But as Viv becomes an ever-increasing presence in their lives, the couple are forced to confront the long-ignored truths about themselves, each other and their pasts that have been a silent, spectral presence between them for years. At this fork in their marriage, they will face the most difficult decision: to cleave together for the sake of their union, or to walk away.
A story about how the ripples in a relationship can become waves, The Single Neighbour holds a mirror up to the promise of domestic bliss, and asks whether an extinguished spark can ever be relit.
