Anne Devlin (writer)

Anne Devlin (born 13 September 1951)[1] is a short story writer, playwright and screenwriter born in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She was a teacher from 1974 to 1978, and started writing fiction in 1976 in Germany. Having lived in London for a decade, she returned to Belfast in 2007.[2]

Anne Devlin

She is the daughter of Paddy Devlin, a Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland and later a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP). She was raised in Belfast. In January 1969, while a student at the New University of Ulster, Devlin joined a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry, organised by the People's Democracy. At Burntollet Bridge, a few miles from Derry, the march was attacked by loyalists. Devlin was struck on the head, knocked unconscious, fell into the river, and was brought to hospital suffering from concussion. The march was echoed in her 1994 play After Easter.[3] Devlin subsequently left Northern Ireland for England. She was visiting lecturer in playwriting at the University of Birmingham in 1987, and a writer in residence at Lund University, Sweden, in 1990.[4]

In 1982, she won the Hennessy Literary Award for her short story Passages, which was adapted for television as A Woman Calling. She has written for the stage: Ourselves Alone (first performed in 1985) and After Easter (first performed in 1994 and for which she won the Lloyds Playwright of the Year).[2] Devlin has also written the screenplays for Titanic Town, adapted from a novel by Mary Costello, the BBC serial The Rainbow (1988), and a version of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights.[5] Her short fiction was collected as The Way-Paver (1986). She received the Samuel Beckett Award in 1984, and won the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize in 1986.[6][7] The Forgotten, a major radio play by Devlin, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2009.[8]