Vanessa O'Loughlin
British-born Irish literary consultant, and author

Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin is an Irish literary coach. She also writes under the pen name Sam Blake.
Career
In 2006, Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin moved from a career in event management to self-employment, founding Inkwell Writers Workshops to run fiction-writing workshops taught by bestselling published writers. During the post-2008 Irish economic downturn, the company was renamed The Inkwell Group and became a publishing consultancy. O'Loughlin publishes crime fiction as "Sam Blake".
In 2019 she was elected to the Management Committee of the Society of Authors. In 2024, she was elected as the new chair, succeeding Joanne Harris.
In 2022, O'Loughlin was one of over 100 authors to contribute to 100 Ways to Write a Book – a compilation of author interviews put together by author Alex Pearl during the COVID pandemic.
Sam Blake
In 2015, Swedish publishing group Bonnier Twenty7 signed O'Loughlin to write a three-book series of crime novels featuring Garda detective Cat Connolly and set in Dublin. The first book in the series was Little Bones, and was released, as were the two subsequent volumes, under the pen name Sam Blake.
The public source identifies “Vanessa O'Loughlin” as british-born Irish literary consultant, and author. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Vanessa, O'Loughlin and British-born.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Apr 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q21063251. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2006, 2008, 2019 and 2024.
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This entry incorporates text from “Vanessa O'Loughlin” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.