David Campbell Callender
David Campbell Callender, a name taken (adapted) from, and in memory of, her gifted Irish grandfather, is the penname of the British anthropologist Ruth Finnegan,
Ruth Finnegan OBE, an anthropologist and multi-award (fiction and nonfiction) author, was born (1933) in the beautiful fraught once-island city of Derry, Northern Ireland, and br.... more
David Campbell Callender, a name taken (adapted) from, and in memory of, her gifted Irish grandfather, is the penname of the British anthropologist Ruth Finnegan,
Ruth Finnegan OBE, an anthropologist and multi-award (fiction and nonfiction) author, was born (1933) in the beautiful fraught once-island city of Derry, Northern Ireland, and brought up there, together with several magical years during the war in Donegal. She was educated at Ballymore first School County Donegal, Londonderry High School, Mount (Quaker) School York, then first class honours in Classics and a doctorate in Anthropology at Oxford. This was followed by fieldwork and university teaching in Africa (principally Sierra Leone and Nigeria). She then joined the pioneering Open University as a founding member of the academic staff, where she spent the rest of her career apart from 3 years (and more fieldwork) at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and is now an Emeritus Professor. She is a Fellow of the British Academy, The Royal Anthropolgical Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, and the American Folklore Society. She is also an Honorary Fellow of Somerville College Oxford.
She has three daughters and five grandchildren and lives in Old Bletchley, southern England, with her husband of over 50 years, where she continues her academic and dream-inspired creatve writing, but now devotes much of her time to her work as co-editor of the innovative Balestier Press young adult series ‘Hearing Others’ Voices’.