The Pursuit of Reason

Sometime academic, teacher, marketing executive and civil servant, Ruth Dudley Edwards has been a freelance writer since 1979.

Ruth was born and brought up in Dublin, was a student at University College Dublin, a post- graduate at Cambridge University and now lives in London. A historian and prize-winning biographer (the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Victor Gollancz: a biography), her recent non-fiction books include True Brits: inside the Foreign Office, The Pursuit of Reason: The Economist 1843-1993, The Faithful Tribe: an intimate portrait of the loyal institutions (shortlisted for the Channel 4 political book prize) and Newspapermen: Hugh Cudlipp, Cecil Harmsworth King and the glory days of Fleet Street.

In the 1970s Ruth wrote her first book, An Atlas of Irish History, the third edition of which was published in 2005. Patrick Pearse: the triumph of failure, which won the National University of Ireland Prize for Historical Research in 1978, was reissued in 2006 with a new foreword.

Since 1993 Ruth has written seriously and/or frivolously for almost every national newspaper in the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom and appears frequently on radio and television in Ireland, the UK and on the BBC World Service. Ruth feels both Irish and English and greatly enjoys being part of both cultures. See her essay The Outsider published in Britain and Ireland: Lives Entwined II (British Council, September 2006).

The Anglo-Irish Murders, her ninth crime novel, is a satire on the peace process. Her tenth, Carnage on the Committee, was set in literary London, and Murdering Americans, set in the academic world of Indiana, is Ruth's latest. Read her article Making Fun of Academics, published in the Mystery Readers Journal.

Three times a bridesmaid, Ruth has been shortlisted by the Crime Writers' Association for the John Creasey Award for the best first novel and twice for the Last Laugh award for the funniest crime novel of the year.