Liam Horan

The big reveal: I Can See It Still cover

So, here it is. The cover of my new book about Mayo football, ‘I Can See It Still: Mayo football all those years. And then 2026.’

‘Mayo football all those years. And then 2026’ is a long tagline by any standards, I accept, but it looks better on the book than here in text.

An illustration might seem a slightly funny choice for a non-fiction book. I wanted the cover to capture something of the Mayo homecoming, the spirit of those extraordinary days and the sheer fun and celebration of it all.

The illustration is by Catherine Diane Highton (see below for more details). This is the third book cover Catherine has worked on with me. Once again she understood what I was trying to get at. Carolina Batista of Unmute Marketing then took Catherine’s illustration and turned it into the finished cover and I couldn’t be happier with it (while accepting that when it comes to design, everything is subjective). Thanks also to book printer Sean McCormack of PROBE Print for all his guidance.

Hopefully it reflects the nature of the book too.

Pre order I Can See It Still in your local bookstore or from our online store

I Can See It Still travels through more than fifty years of Mayo football: the great days and the really bad ones, the people and places, the trips , the near misses and the odd little things that stay with you. The big events are there, but so too are my own recollections of living through them.

And then came 2026.

The storied year of 2026 isn’t just the final chapter. It runs through the book from the very first word. For the first time, we can look back on all those years knowing where they eventually led.

You can pre-order your copy of the book here: www.liamhoran.info/seeitstill.

And we’ll launch I Can See It Still on Friday, 16 October, at 7.45pm in An Sportlann, the home of Castlebar Mitchels (note new venue). Thanks to Mitchels for hosting us.

Anyway, this is the cover. I hope you like it too. 

About the artwork

The cover of I Can See It Still was created by illustrator Catherine Diane Highton (follow her on Instagram), who also designed the covers of my two previous books – Second Chance & Other Stories and On The Way Out. You can see – and, indeed, buy – both books HERE.

Catherine creates her illustrations by painting digitally in Photoshop, using a drawing tablet. Her process also involves photobashing, a technique that incorporates photographic references and texture elements to help create realistic details such as buildings, roads, foliage and skies.

These elements are painted over, adjusted and blended into the overall illustration, with the composition and painting carried out by Catherine. No generative AI was used in creating the cover. It is always fascinating to work with an illustrator through the varioius iterative phases until we arrive at the final product.

Supporting creative artists of all types is something we believe in very strongly.