evelyn conlon

Born in Co. Monaghan, she was educated there, and briefly at University College Dublin to which she later returned as Writer in Residence. She was a winner of the European Schools Day essay competition in 1969 and had her first stories published at the age of seventeen in ‘New Irish Writing’, The Irish Press.

At nineteen she emigrated to Australia, sailing by ship to Sydney. She spent three years there, travelling throughout the country and working ‘at anything and everything, anywhere’, including six months in the mining town of Mount Isa and a stint as writer on a geography encyclopedia of Australia. She returned to Ireland in 1975, opting to travel by bus from Katmandu.

On her return she gave birth to the first of her two sons, and then continued her third-level education at NUI, Maynooth where she founded the crèche. She was a founder member of the Rape Crisis Centre and was active in many campaigns.

Her first collection of short stories was published in 1987 and this has been followed to date by two more collections and three novels. She has compiled and edited three other books, and is an occasional reviewer on radio and television. She is a conscientious researcher and has lectured on this and many other aspects of a writing life. Her last novel entailed visiting Death Row in the US, and doing widespread interviews with people on both sides of the capital punishment debate. Research for her present work has taken her back to Australia, which she “delightedly managed to put back on the map, more than twenty years after leaving”. She now lives in Dublin.