Malachi O'Doherty

I was born in Muff, County Donegal Ireland, to a barman and a nurse who had met just after the Second World War.

I grew up in Belfast, on a housing estate to the west of the city, in the shadow of Black Mountain, and as a child I played in fields and on building sites.

I didn't settle into a conventional career path but was unemployed for periods and traveled.

I worked as a staff journalist on the Sunday News in Belfast in the early 1970s and for a few months as the sports editor of the Morecambe Visitor.

I worked on a fairground and picked fruit on farms. I have been a teacher to Libyan soldiers, a ghost writer for a Hindu swami and a freelance journalist in Belfast for the BBC and several newspapers.

Much of my writing career coincided with the Northern Irish Troubles and I have written four books about that period, The Trouble With Guns, The Telling Year, Gerry Adams, An Unauthorised Life and Fifty Years On, The Troubles and the Struggle for Change in Northern Ireland.

Republicans tend to get a bit tetchy about my work and regard me as an unfair critic but I write from my experiences as one who lived through much of the Troubles and worked as a journalist interacting with many of those who took part and those who suffered.

Two of my books address religion. I Was A Teenage Catholic recalls a Catholic upbringing and compares it to the years I spent in an Indian ashram. Empty Pulpits is a more analytical book about the decline of religion in Ireland.

More recently I have written about my father in Under His Roof. This was an effort to get to know and understand a difficult man. One thing I inherited from him was a love of cycling and that is the theme of my book, On My Own Two Wheels.

I have written some short fiction.

My first novel, Terry Brankin Has A Gun, (Merrion 2020) explores issues of guilt and responsibility against the backdrop of the paramilitary campaigns in Northern Ireland.