Angeline King
Northern Irish writer
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Angeline King (known professionally as Dr. Angeline Kelly) is a Northern Irish novelist, essayist and poet.[1][2][3] Her work includes fiction, non-fiction and poetry, with a particular focus on Ulster, language, cultural memory, and shared cultural traditions.[4] She has served as writer-in-residence at Ulster University's Coleraine campus, holds a PhD in English, and is known for including Ulster Scots language and international perspectives into contemporary Irish writing.[5]
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Writing career
Fiction
King's debut novel, Snugville Street (2015) depicted a French exchange between the working class, Protestant Shankill area of Belfast and Brittany in France, and was described as "enjoyable" in a review in The Irish Times.[6] Her second novel, A Belfast Tale (2016), continued this engagement with urban community and identity.[7][8] The novel was re-published as Road to Snugville Street in 2025. In Dusty Bluebells (2020), a family saga set largely in County Antrim, King made use of Ulster Scots dialect as a literary medium.[9] In The Irish Times, Ruth McKee described the book as being "Pithy with Ulster Scots, old rhymes, cures and sayings, there is a sense of magic to it all".[10] King subsequently translated Dusty Bluebells into Scots.[11] In Scotland, the novel was compared to the work of Jessie Kesson: "Past haunts present across the generations. King gets inside her people... More Jessie Kesson than Kailyard".[12]
A fourth novel, The Secret Diary of Stephanie Agnew (2025), addresses language and identity in Northern Ireland and draws on King’s childhood experiences.[5] The short novel explores the history of east Antrim's Gaelic bards, the Ó Gnímh / Agnew,[13] and considers the hereditary poets’ contribution, identity and history in the context of a contemporary diary novel.[4][13]
Claire Mitchell, who described Dusty Bluebells as the first 'feminist' book she had read in Ulster Scots,[14] included a chapter on Angeline King in The Ghost Limb, which considers 'Alternative Protestants and the Spirit of 1798'.
King was writer-in-residence at the Ulster University campus in Coleraine from 2020 to 2023.[11]