Sharon Dempsey is a Northern Irish based writer. Her new novel The Midnight Killing, published by Avon Harper Collins, is out now. The first in the series, Who took Eden Mulligan?, came out in 2021 and is available now in the US, and both books have been sold for translation rights in the Czech region. She is undertaking a creative-critical PhD at Queen's University Belfast, exploring the victim and the role of the body, with reference to class and gender in Northern Irish crime fiction. The novels explored in her corpus represent contemporary Northern Ireland, often negotiating trauma from the recent past, and operate within the subgenres of the police procedural, domestic noir.
The PhD creative component takes the form of a novel, in the sub-genre of the domestic noir. It is called After the Party and is in part inspired and informed by the highly publicised account of the Belfast Rape trial of 2018, which involved four Ulster rugby players.
As an undergraduate student she studied Politics and English at Queen's University and went on to study newspaper journalism at City University, London. She was a journalist and health writer before turning to writing crime fiction and has written for a variety of publications and newspapers, including the Irish Times. Sharon is an experienced creative writing facilitator. She has published five novels and three non-fiction books. Sharon has many short stories published in anthologies, literary journals magazines and broadcast on radio.
She was awarded the Miss Margaret Cuthbert Frazer Research Bursary by Queen's University in 2021 and has shared her work at many international conferences.