1. When did you think about a career in writing and what were your first steps into it? I always wanted to be a writer, from almost as soon as I started reading.

THE story of forbidden love between two young people from opposing religions in Northern Ireland isn’t new for young adult fiction.

FICTION The End Of The World Is A Cul De Sac by Louise Kennedy is published in hardback by Bloomsbury Publishing, priced £14.

IT'S been a massive month for women's football in the north with the Northern Ireland women's team making history by earning their first ever qualification for a major tournament.

FICTION Every Vow You Break by Peter Swanson is published in hardback by Faber & Faber, priced £12.

THE IRA ordered that a senior member who later emerged as a suspected informer be shot for running a brothel with loyalists in the 1970s, a new book claims.

JUGGLING is something working parents have had to do even more during this past year as the restrictions of Covid-19 merged home and working lives.

THE Reverend Richard Coles is a former pop star, Strictly Come Dancing contestant, perennial game show guest and genial Radio 4 presenter.

IN A (professional) lifetime spent in and out of prisons, visits to Maghaberry and the Maze were among the strangest I made.

1. WHEN did you think about a career in writing and what were your first steps into it? I came to it by accident, when a friend cajoled me into joining a writing group in 2014, when I was 47.

WHEN best-selling author Brian McGilloway last spoke to The Irish News, in early March 2020, Covid had just hit the headlines and lockdown had put paid to planned launch events for his acclaimed standalone novel The Last Crossing.

RENOWNED English novelist John Le Carré died an Irishman after he took citizenship before his death in December last year.

ON MARCH 7 1921, the Protests and Appeals Committee of the Irish Football Association (IFA) met to schedule the replay of an Irish Cup semi-final tie between Dublin-based club Shelbourne and Lurgan-based club Glenavon.

HE’S the TV bushcraft expert who’s travelled to some of the wildest regions of the planet, from the tropical lushness of the Amazon rainforest to the chilly wilds of the Arctic – but Ray Mears says his favourite place to ramble is still his home place, Britain.

"IT WAS a work of art.

"SHANNON McNulty was born to give me a break from another book I was writing," explains Co Down crime author Gerard Brennan of how his new heroine was 'birthed' as a stress buster while working on his acclaimed 2018 novel Disorder.

MICHAEL Rosen looks like a sprightly 74-year-old, wispy curls of grey hair and short beard framing his long friendly face, as he tells me about the exercise regime he has undertaken to get him back to full health after his terrifyingly close brush with death from Covid.

1. When did you think about a career in writing and what were your first steps into it? When younger, I assumed people without a valid construct for living sat in their squats and wrote stuff that was glued into books for boring people to say ooh, that’s so interesting.

EVERYONE'S past catches up with them eventually – especially in Northern Ireland.

FORTHRIGHT and funny, prominent feminist Caitlin Moran is extolling the virtues of motherhood in the run-up to Mother’s Day.