After earning a degree in history from Trinity College Dublin, he worked as a primary and secondary school teacher from 1970 until 1990, when he took early retirement to focus on writing.
[8][9] Writing part-time while also pursuing his career as a teacher, McBratney had published twenty-three novels by the time he retired from teaching in 1990, most of them targeted at young adult readers.
One of his most successful works in this genre was The Chieftain's Daughter (1993), a historical novel set in the 5th century, which won a Bisto Book of the Year Merit Award in 1994.
[16] McBratney has been called "a highly skilled but somewhat uneven" author,[11] and he himself commented that many of his earlier works sold "just a few hundred copies," and were remaindered.
Booklist reviewer Stephanie Zvirin, for example, suggested that there was "not a note wrong" in the book, and predicted that it would become "an enduring bedtime favorite – right up there with Goodnight Moon" shortly after its publication.