Brendan Anderson

Brendan Anderson was born in Belfast in December 1945. He has worked in print for thirty-five years – first as a compositor, then as a proofreader, a typesetter and page make-up artist. Selected by an enlightened editor at the Irish News to be trained as a journalist in 1989, he became senior reporter and security writer for that paper within two years. He has covered all the big stories of the Irish troubles, and interviewed and questioned all of the major players. He has had unrivalled contacts with republicans and loyalists, and is frequently interviewed as a security analyst on Irish and British television and radio, and consulted by British newspapers. Seconded to the University of Ulster, Belfast, to lecture in Practical Newspaper Journalism in 1998, he joined the staff of the university as an associate lecturer in Journalism in 1999. He is a freelance writer for a United States weekly newspaper. He is a father of three, and grandfather of ten, and lives in Belfast.