Rosemary Jenkinson was born in Belfast in 1967 and is an award-winning playwright and short story writer. She left in 1986 for Durham University and taught English in Greece, France, the Czech Republic, and Poland before returning to Belfast in 2002.
Plays include The Bonefire (Stewart Parker BBC Radio Award), Planet Belfast, Here Comes the Night, Michelle and Arlene, May the Road Rise Up, and Lives in Translation. She was 2017 Artist-in-Residence at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. Rosemary’s short story collections include Contemporary Problems Nos. 53 & 54 (Lagan Press, 2004), Aphrodite’s Kiss (Whittrick Press, 2016) Catholic Boy (Doire Press, 2018) which was shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature, and Lifestyle Choice 10mgs (Doire Press 2020). She was singled out by "The Irish Times" for ‘an elegant wit, terrific characterisation and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast’. In 2018 she received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a memoir.
The Linen Hall Library is honoured to hold Rosemary Jenkinson’s archive in its collection.
Photograph of Rosemary Jenkinson in Prague, by Yoshito Komi.
