Educated in Cambridge, an English graduate with an MA from King's College, Cambridge she went on to be a junior fellow at the Institute for Irish Studies, Queen's University Belfast.

She was editor there and compiled The Dictionary of Ulster Biography.

[1][2] She is co-founder, with her mother of the Summer Palace Press, begun in 1999, and lives in Kilcar near Killybegs, Donegal.

Review by John McAuliffe in the Irish Times:[5]Newmann knows her subjects must not be understood as an exception or aberration: the book's most effective poems are those which struggle into quandaries, linking the Holocaust to a world we recognise.[...]

Grim is a challenging book, but there is nothing glib about the way it responds to its historical material.