About Jean Rafferty
Jean Rafferty is a writer of journalism and non-fiction books who has a doctorate in creative writing for her novel, Myra, Beyond Saddleworth. Her range as a journalist is wide, from gritty human interest stories to humour to celebrity interviews. For over 25 years she has worked for a variety of both broadsheet and tabloid publications, from the Sunday Times Magazine to the Sunday People. She did lengthy pieces on subjects such as torture, suicide, murder and prostitution for Guardian Weekend Magazine and the Sunday Herald, but also enjoyed light-hearted comment for daily newspapers.
In 2007 she was shortlisted in the British Press Awards (one of only two freelance journalists to be nominated) for her article in The Independent on the death of a friend and the impact of death on the baby boomers' generation. She also won a Norwich Union Medical Journalism Award for her piece on feeding of the elderly in hospitals.
She won the 2005 Rosemary Goodchild Award for her 'gutsy and clever' article on abortion in the Sunday Herald and was also shortlisted in the Norwich Union Medical Journalism Awards that year for her Sunday Herald piece on Kylie Minogue's breast cancer.
In 2003 she won a Joseph Rowntree Foundation journalist's fellowship to write 'Disposable Women,' a book on prostitution. This funding enabled her to travel to several European countries to research different ways of dealing with the sex industry.
She won the National Daily Category in the 1999 Travelex Travel Writing Awards for her 'inspired piece' on Buenos Aires and was shortlisted for Feature Writer of the Year in the 1997 British Press awards for her work on ritual abuse and rape.
She has travelled widely for her journalism and has also taught on various journalism workshops in countries such as Nepal, Albania, Zimbabwe and Sierra Leone. For many years she was a visiting lecturer on the University of Strathclyde‘s postgraduate and undergraduate courses in Journalism and Creative Writing.
Rafferty is the author of two non-fiction books on sport: ‘The Cruel Game,’ about a year spent on the snooker circuit; and ‘Ladies of the Court,’ with Virginia Wade, about 100 years of women’s champions at Wimbledon.
She is chair of Scottish PEN's Writers in Prison committee and visited Turkey in February 2005 as an international observer at the trial of dissident writer and publisher, Ragip Zarakolu. www.scottishpen.org
She was longlisted in the 2007 Fish Short Story Competition and also in their 2004 and 2008 One Page Story Competitions. She was on the Scottish shortlist for the 2004 Real Writers' Awards.
Rafferty's short fiction has been published in Writers' Forum,Cutting Teeth, Alternative and Riptide.Her company fireopal produces flash fiction on cards with coloured envelopes. These were available in Borders, Glasgow and are now available on her website (See fireopal page) as well as in Readinglasses and The Byre, two bookshops in Scotland's national book town, Wigtown.
Rafferty's novella, The Diva, about a Glaswegian who becomes an international opera star, is available from the fireopal page.
