Anthony J Quinn

Anthony J. Quinn is the internationally acclaimed author of ten novels, mostly in the crime fiction and historical fiction genres. His debut novel Disappeared (Head of Zeus, 2014) was a Daily Mail crime novel of the year and a Sunday Times best novel of the year. It was also shortlisted by the book critics of the Washington Post, the LA Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle for a Strand Critics award in the US, and longlisted for the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year in the UK.

One of his central literary themes is that there is no such thing as a placeless crime. Although steeped in the conventions of crime fiction, his novels also chart the moods, landscapes and complex social realities of his native Ulster. His latest novel Murder Memoir Murder deploys the conventions of crime fiction and memoir writing to investigate the problems and procedures of storytelling itself, reflected in the fictional detective’s role in piecing together lost, concealed or partial stories about the past.

He has written about crime fiction academically and critically in numerous news articles and has spoken extensively on this subject at events and festivals in Britain, Ireland and Europe. He lectures in creative writing at Queen’s University Belfast, and has held writer-in-residence posts at Libraries Northern Ireland and in County Cavan. He also teaches creative writing and mentors at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin, and the Prison Arts Foundation. He lives in County Tyrone with his wife, Clare, and their four children.