Dr Ruth Dudley Edwards was born and brought up in Dublin. Since she graduated she has worked in England as a teacher, a Cambridge postgraduate student, a marketing executive, a civil servant and finally, a freelance writer, journalist and broadcaster.

An historian and prize-winning biographer, her non-fiction includes biographies of Patrick Pearse and Victor Gollancz (winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography), The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist, 1843-1993, True Brits: inside the Foreign Office, The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions, Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the glory days of Fleet Street and Aftermath: The Omagh Bombing and the Families’ Pursuit of Justice (long-listed for the Orwell Prize and winner of the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger for non-fiction).

As a journalist, she has written for most national newspapers in the UK and Ireland. She has a column in the Irish Sunday Independent and is a blogger on the Daily Telegraph.

The targets of her eleven satirical crime novels include the civil service, gentlemen’s clubs, academia, the House of Lords, the Church of England, publishing, literary awards and – above all – political correctness. Murdering Americans won the Last Laugh Award at CrimeFest. Her most recent book is Killing the Emperors,  which is about the insanity of the art market and that confidence trick that is conceptual art and won the Goldsboro Books Last Laugh Award at CrimeFest..The Seven, her composite biography of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, will be published in the spring by Oneworld Publications.’