Her work there included founding and leading the Rushdie Defense Committee (USA) and travelling to Indonesia and Guatemala to investigate local human rights conditions for writers.

During her seven-year stay in New York, Dowd was named one of the "top 100 Irish-Americans" by Irish-America Magazine and Aer Lingus for her global anti-censorship work.

The program takes authors into schools in socially deprived areas, as well as prisons, young offender's institutions and community projects.

[2] Before her death from breast cancer, the Siobhan Dowd Trust,[6] a registered charity,[7] was established, wherein the proceeds from her literary work will be used to assist disadvantaged children with their reading skills.

It features a boy who makes a horrible discovery digging peat in 1980s Ireland: the body of a young girl who may have been murdered.

What she didn't have, unfortunately, was time.—Patrick Ness, in the Author's Note to A Monster Calls[12]Dowd had undertaken at least one more children's novel before her death, about a young boy coming to terms with his mother's terminal illness.

She had discussed it and contracted to write it with editor Denise Johnstone-Burt at Walker Books, who also worked with Patrick Ness, author of the acclaimed Chaos Walking trilogy.

Her first marriage to Mial Pagan broke down in the early 1990s and she subsequently moved to New York City, where she worked for PEN American Center.