Dervla Murphy was born in Co. Waterford in 1931, of Dublin-born parents. Her grandfather and most of his family were involved in the Irish Republican movement. Dervla was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford until she was fourteen, after which she kept house for her parents and nursed her invalid mother for sixteen years – with occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent.
On her mother’s death she was free to go further afield and in 1963 she set off for India by bike. Her description of that journey – Full Tilt: From Ireland to India with a Bicycle – was published in 1965 and has been a critical and popular favourite ever since. She went on to explore the culture and mountain valleys of the Himalayas and then Ethiopia. Her fifth book, On a Shoestring to Coorg, introduced Dervla’s young daughter Rachel, as a doughty travelling companion. These early works were crowned by the publication of Wheels within Wheels, a funny, touching, beautifully written autobiography charting her richly unconventional first thirty years.
Since then, fifteen increasingly political investigations led to a journey to Cuba in the company of Rachel and her three granddaughters, in The Island that Dared. Her most recent book, A Month by the Sea: Encounters in Gaza, was published in 2013.