The Anti Room

I’ve just started reading a book. Normally, I would wait until I’d finished reading a book before offering it – and my thoughts on it – up for you to consider. But I feel this book deals with such an important subject that I can’t wait until I’ve finished to talk/write about it. This book – “Unnatural [...]

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Down These Green Streets is a new collection of short stories and non-fiction from Irish crime writers, edited by Declan Burke. In this extract, Anti-Room writer and crime novelist Arlene Hunt talks about her own relationship with crime. A Shock to the System: Irish Crime Writing and the Personal in the Political When I was [...]

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Four weeks ago today, as a sunny Sunday came to a close, I sat in the restaurant of a hotel in Clare. Perched on a clifftop, the view was of huge Atlantic waves crashing on the beach, the surfers long gone as the last light drained from the sky. My husband was putting our children [...]

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There’s a delightful video doing the rounds this last couple of weeks – a cover version of Chris Brown’s Look At Me Now by a band called Karmin, notable because Karmin singer Amy Heidemann does an amazing interpretation of bullet-rapping Busta Rhyme’s verses. I watched it, loved it, shared it with my friends. And as [...]

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Here’s a bizarre dichotomy to consider: corrective rape. Yes, raping a person to make them see the error of their ways. I wish I could tell you I’d made it up, but it seems it’s all the rage at home, in South Africa. Now take a moment to consider and remember the following women, all [...]

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THE four-letter word I most dislike begins with a ‘C’. We’ve already had that debate on this blog. But the most abused and misused four-letter word I can think of is ‘rape’. There was a time, not too long ago, where it wasn’t considered polite to mention rape in conversation. Too raw, too politically-charged, too [...]

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A few years ago a good friend of mine talked me out of my customary sloth and into agreeing to run the mini marathon with her.  Seems a work colleague of hers was involved with a charity called Ruhama and was keen to raise much needed funds. I’d never heard of them but agreed to [...]

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The sentencing last week of Stephen “Rossi” Walsh for the sexual assault of a seven-year-old girl some 20 years ago is simply one of the dozens of crimes against women that pass through the Central Criminal Court each year. 62-year-old Dubliner, Walsh hit the headlines because of his long and glittering career as a criminal [...]

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“It is now more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict.” Major General Patrick Cammaert, former UN Peacekeeping Operation Commander in DRC. Yesterday, during a briefing organised by the Joint Consortium on Gender Based Violence, a characteristically calm and measured Mary Robinson spoke movingly of a recent visit to [...]

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Summer 1995 and London was fast draining of charm. In my last year at Middlesex University, a young psycho was sauntering about North London slashing women’s throats. Anthony Peter Roach, age 24, from Hornsey, had stabbed a woman to death as she walked home from Turnpike Lane Tube station. Hours later he attempted to murder a woman a couple of miles away [...]

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