Dr Ruth Dudley Edwards is a Dublin-born prize-winning biographer and crime-writer.  Her 23 books include biographies of the leaders of the 1916 Irish rebellion, Victor Gollancz (which won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize) and The Pursuit of Reason: the Economist, 1843-1993.  She was Chairwoman of the apolitical British Association for Irish Studies from 1985-93, where she encouraged free discussion of contentious issues from all quarters. Thereafter she became a political commentator writing for British and Irish newspapers.  Her strongly anti-IRA stance, her sympathy with terrorist victims, and her friendship with beleaguered Ulster Protestants soon became evident in her journalism, and in books on the loyalist institutions (The Faithful Tribe) and the 1998 Omagh bombing.   A campaigner for free speech, she has also written twelve critically acclaimed satirical crime novels, largely set within the British establishment and academia, which became increasingly targeted at political correctness and establishment cowardice.