Ronan Bennett

Ronan Bennett (born 14 January 1956) is a Northern Irish novelist and screenwriter.

Bennett born in England but raised in Newtownabbey, Northern Ireland in a devout Roman Catholic family, the son of William H. and Geraldine Bennett. He attended St Mary's Christian Brothers' Grammar School, Belfast.

In 1974, aged 18, Bennett was convicted of murdering Inspector William Elliott, a 49-year-old police officer in the Royal Ulster Constabulary during an Official IRA bank robbery at the Ulster Bank in The Diamond shopping area at Rathcoole, close to his Merville Garden Village home, on 6 September 1974. His conviction was declared unsafe in 1975 and he was released from Long Kesh prison.

Bennett moved to London and in 1978 he was arrested for conspiracy to cause explosions and spent 16 months in prison on remand. Bennett conducted his own defence, and he and his co-defendants were acquitted in 1979. He studied history at King's College London receiving a first class honours degree, and later completed his PhD at the college in 1987. That same year, he was hired as a parliamentary researcher by Jeremy Corbyn MP, later Leader of the Labour Party, in a move that provoked controversy and security concerns.

Bennett lives in London with his family. His partner since King's College, was Georgina Henry, former deputy editor of The Guardian and editor of guardian.co.uk, the newspaper's website; Henry died in February 2014 from sinus cancer.

Since 2006, he has co-hosted a regular Monday chess column with Daniel King in The Guardian, which seeks to be instructive, rather than topical. Through test positions taken from actual games, their amateur and expert assessments of the possible continuations are discussed and compared. It has been supposed that Nigel Short's column was axed to make way for the new feature and the justification for this change has been the subject of some debate in chess circles.

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