Angela Duffy

Angela Duffy doesn’t remember when she first decided to be a writer, but does remember writing and sending an article to the Birkenhead News when she was 14. She did it in secret - partly because she typed it on her father's typewriter (strictly off-limits) so had to wait until everyone was out. She waited for the plaudits and finally received her first rejection slip! There followed a spate of writing - plays, poetry (interpret that loosely) and the usual autobiographical stuff while the daytime job (being a convent schoolgirl) took up as little of her time as she could manage. Two years as a student nurse ended when she realised that she was fed up with too many women and hated living in London, so back home to Merseyside (a salutary experience - she hadn't realised how much freedom she'd had in London until then) and began applying to universities. Big surprise when Trinity College, Dublin, suddenly said "Yes, come. Term begins next week." Thus began four very happy but not terribly hardworking years of French, Italian and Spanish. Then home again to teaching. Husband and four children later she joined Liverpool Writers Club, began to write and eventually to sell magazine stories, her novels are dusty parcels in a desk drawer! Early retirement because of blindness (mercifully this only lasted for about a year) gave her freedom again, but what to do with it? So she took advantage of a new initiative at the University of Liverpool (UK) and went back to university to read part time Irish Studies. She envisaged a term to see how useless she was but finished with a doctorate and an obsession fourteen years later. The book (Informers in 20th Century Ireland) just published began life as her thesis.

She likes secrets, danger and skullduggery and loves researching and writing Irish history. Who needs fiction when the past is so much more interesting?

She dislikes housework, cooking, sport and having her photograph taken, but would really like to know what readers think of the book - warts and all, please. Email her at: focloir149@gmail.com.

Currently writing a new book about Penal times in Ireland when it was forbidden to be a Catholic and could lead to a death sentence for Catholic priests. Many English soldiers made extra money by hunting priests down for the reward. The book includes lists of the murdered priests and a lot of the more notable stories of how they lived in hiding.