Academic and writing background for Denis MacEoin
In 1984, Denis MacEoin he embarked on what was for many years his principal career, writing fiction, under the pseudonym Daniel Easterman. Under the Easterman name, he has published fifteen novels, all international thrillers, many of them best-sellers. Among the best known are: The Seventh Sanctuary, The Ninth Buddha, and Midnight Comes at Noon. As Easterman, he has been translated into about fifteen languages. The most recent, The Sword, was published in 2007 and The Spear of Destiny appeared in spring 2009. As Jonathan Aycliffe, he has written a further eight novels, all ghost stories in the classic English tradition. Naomi’s Room has been optioned for film in Hollywood, and The Vanishment and The Matrix have recently been optioned by two British film companies.

He has worked as a writing tutor as the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newcastle University, where he now teaches a short course in creative writing (‘Writing in Genre’). He was for some years the editor of a US-based journal, The Middle East Quarterly. At present, he is working on a new novel, set in Ethiopia, and has plans for several others. He has also written a crime novel and a story of historicalpresent-day fiction, which await publication.

In 1992, HarperCollins published a volume of his journalism under the title New Jerusalems: Islam, Religious Fundamentalism, and the Rushdie Affair.

Academically, he first graduated with an M.A. in English from Trinity College, Dublin, followed by a second degree in Persian, Arabic, and Islamic Studies from Edinburgh and a PhD in PersianIslamic Studies from Cambridge (King’s College). From 1979-80, he taught at Mohammed V University in Fez, Morocco, before taking up a post as lecturer in Arabic and Islamic Studies at Newcastle. In 1986, he was made Honorary Fellow in the Centre for Islamic and Middle East Studies at Durham University. He has published extensively on Islamic topics, contributing to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Islam in the Modern World, the Encyclopaedia Iranica, the Penguin Handbook of Living Religions, journals, festschrifts, and books, and has himself written a number of books, including The Sources for Babi History and Doctrine, Rituals in Babism and Baha’ism, and the forthcoming The Messiah of Shiraz: Studies in Early and Middle Babism; he has also co-edited Islam in the Modern World.

He has recently worked extensively on radical Islam in the UK for the think tank Policy Exchange, has written a full-scale report on Islamic hate literature found in Britain (The Hijacking of British Islam), and is now working on two projects for a different think tank, one on Islamic education, the other on shari’a courts. His study for Civitas of Muslim schools in the UK, Music, Chess and other Sins: Segregation, Integration, and Muslim Schools in Britain, is about to be published in hard copy and online, and is already attracting publicity in the UK national press.

He has served as a member of the advisory council of the Centre for Social Cohesion, an offshoot of the think tank Civitas.

In September 2005, he was appointed to the post of Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Newcastle University. That post terminated in June 2008. He also teaches a module in creative writing (genre fiction) at Newcastle University.

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