Anne Devlin
After a career in radio (THE LONG MARCH), TV (NAMING THE NAMES), film (TITANIC TOWN), and theatre (OURSELVES ALONE & AFTER EASTER) throughout the 80s and 90s, Anne Devlin returned to Belfast in 2008 and to storytelling once more. The recipient of an Arts Council Individual Artist Award in 2016, she is currently finalising a collection of short stories. Two of the new stories, WINTER JOURNEY (THE APPARITIONS) and CORNUCOPIA have already been published by New Island Books in 2015. THE TRANSIT OF MERCY was commissioned and broadcast by BBC Radio 4 In 2016. The forthcoming collection, eight stories in all, centres around the returning histories which emerge as apparitions or interruptions in the visual sphere. At the same time, they are a necessary prelude to a play.
THE FORGOTTEN is a radio play first broadcast on Radio 4 in January 2009, for which she has written an essay 'Waking The Forgotten', which was published in Female Lines in 2016 and inspired by the Abbey Theatre protests movement Waking The Feminists.
Returning to Northern Ireland in the age of commemorations, fifty
years since the beginning of the Civil Rights Movement, Anne has been involved in re-evaluating her own eye witness participation from the stance of the counterculture sixties international student movement, when she was still a schoolgirl.
On 6th October 2018 she curated an event Reflections on 68 in the Playhouse in Derry for twelve women writers across the generations. Her own dramatic monologue Notes For The 5th October was broadcasted on RTE Sunday Miscellany. She travelled with this to Sorbonne University, Paris in May 2018 and Georgetown University, Washington D.C. in December, and produced another dramatic monologue TELLING LIES ABOUT BURNTOLLET at the Playhouse in January 2019.
Her theatre play MY GENERATION is set in the decade-long light of the Good Friday Agreement. Her second (work in progress) stage play AR LA (OUR DAY) is set in the present day: MY GENERATION and AR LA are set ten years apart and form a dilogy.
She has also recently written and published two important essays: 'Responsibility for the Dead' (2019) in the Irish Pages and 'Swimming in History' (2020).