Anne Devlin was born to a Catholic family in Belfast in 1951. She is the daughter of Paddy Devlin, a member of Parliament for the Social Democratic and Labor Party. Devlin was raised in Belfast, lived for a short while in Andersonstown, Northern Ireland, and then left Northern Ireland for England. She was visiting lecturer in playwriting at the University of Birmingham in 1987, and a writer in residence at the University of Lund, Sweden, in 1990.

Devlin's work includes short stories and plays, most of which center on the lives of Catholic women during the period of civil disturbance in Northern Ireland which began in 1969. Devlin's short stories were first published in the early 1980s, and nine of them were collected in The Way-Paver in 1986. The collection includes the story "Passages," which won the Hennessy Literary Award for Short Stories in 1982. Devlin adapted this story for BBC television...