Richard O'Rawe Books in Order

Richard O'Rawe was born in 1953 and grew up in Belfast's Lower Falls district, a working-class area shaped by the long conflict in Northern Ireland. He has described growing up amid the civic unrest that affected the city for decades.

His family history was political, too. O'Rawe has said that his father had been involved with the IRA in earlier campaigns, and he himself joined the organisation as a teenager.

The early 1970s brought internment and imprisonment. After a 1977 bank robbery, O'Rawe was sent first to Crumlin Road Gaol and then to Long Kesh, also known as the Maze prison, where he spent six years.

That time would inform almost everything he later wrote.

In 1981, O'Rawe was the IRA prisoners' press officer during the hunger strike at Long Kesh. He was one of the blanket men, the prisoners who had refused prison uniforms during the earlier protest. Ten hunger strikers died before the protest ended, and the events left a permanent mark on him.

After his release in 1983, he continued working in public relations for the republican movement. In 1986, he stepped away from that work to put more time into family life. Writing was not the obvious next move. It came later, after he gave testimony to an oral-history project in 2001 and found himself finally putting his own account of the hunger strike into words.

His first book, Blanketmen, appeared in 2005. It is a personal account of the prison protest and hunger strike, including O'Rawe's claim that a possible settlement was accepted by prison leaders but rejected outside the prison. Those claims have been strongly disputed, but the book made him a central voice in arguments about that period.

He followed it with Afterlives, which digs further into the alleged offer and its aftermath. In In the Name of the Son, he wrote about his lifelong friend Gerry Conlon, one of the Guildford Four, focusing on Conlon's difficult years after his wrongful conviction was overturned. Both books stay close to the human cost behind public history.

O'Rawe moved into fiction with Northern Heist in 2018, after spending years developing the novel. It introduces James "Ructions" O'Hare, a former IRA man planning a huge Belfast bank robbery. The follow-up, Goering's Gold, sends Ructions into a hunt for missing Nazi bullion while old enemies keep closing in.

His later nonfiction includes Stakeknife's Dirty War, an investigation of Freddie Scappaticci, the IRA figure accused of working as a British agent inside its internal security unit. In 2020, O'Rawe also co-wrote a stage version of In the Name of the Son.

More recently, he teamed up with his daughter Bernadette on Witch Hunt, the first Grace O'Malley crime novel. Across memoir, biography, investigative nonfiction, and thrillers, O'Rawe returns to Belfast, loyalty, betrayal, and the hard work of living with the past.