Background
She is the daughter of Paddy Devlin, a Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland and later a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (Social Democratic and Labour Party).
She is the daughter of Paddy Devlin, a Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland and later a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (Social Democratic and Labour Party).
Ulster University.
She was a teacher from 1974–1978 and started writing fiction in 1976 in Germany. Having lived in London for a decade, she returned to Belfast in 2007. She was raised in Belfast.
In January 1969, while a student at the New University of Ulster, Devlin joined a civil rights march from Belfast to Derry, organised by the People"s Democracy.
At Burntollet Bridge, a few miles from Derry, the march was attacked by loyalists. Devlin was struck on the head, knocked unconscious, fell into the river and was brought to hospital suffering from concussion.
The march was echoed in her 1994 play After Easter. Devlin subsequently left Northern Ireland for England.
She was visiting lecturer in playwriting at the University of Birmingham in 1987, and a writer in residence at Lund University, Sweden, in 1990.
Devlin has also written the screenplays for Titanic Town, which is adapted from a novel by Mary Costello, and Emily Brontë"s Wuthering Heights. Her short fiction was collected as The Way-Paver (1986). She also wrote the screenplay for The Rainbow, produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation in 1988.