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Rosemary Jenkinson

Playwright, Short-story writer, Memoirist, Essayist

About

Rosemary Jenkinson is a short-story writer, playwright, poet, essayist, memoirist and cultural commentator. She particularly loves the short story as she fervently believes life is too short for long literature. Her sixth collection of short stories Love in the Time of Chaos (Arlen House, 2023) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story prize. The Irish Times has praised her fiction for ‘an elegant wit, terrific characterisation and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast’. 

Rosemary has had over twenty plays produced internationally. The Bonefire (Rough Magic, 2006) won the Stewart Parker BBC Radio award. She likes to write edgy work often based on people she meets in the pub and considers it her mission to record personal Troubles stories before they disappear, much as the Gaelic revivalists used to record local folk tales. Writing is her passion; she doesn’t fit her writing into her life but her life into her writing. She was an Arts Council major artist followed by writer in residence at the Lyric Theatre Belfast and Leuven College of Irish Studies. 

Before publication, Rosemary did TEFL in Athens, France, Prague and Poland, and taught in England. She adopted the Tennessee Williams approach of gaining as much writing material as possible by working in factories, supermarkets, nightclubs, restaurants, shops, a publishing company, a holiday park and the civil service. She now lives in Belfast, but can never sit still (except at her desk, of course) and is writing fiction about her previous trips to Ukraine.