She was educated at the Dominican school at Eccles Street,[2] and grew up in an artistic family, her father being a Dublin strolling player and writer of satirical verse.
After moving back to Ireland, she began to write, and worked as an associate editor and theatre critic of The Bell,[3] a famed Irish literary review founded by Seán Ó Faoláin and Peadar O'Donnell.
[4] While taking time off from her fiction career to raise a family in the decade that followed, she was a journalist and columnist with the Irish national newspaper the Evening Press from 1963 to 1983.
Mulkerns was joint winner of the AIB Prize for Literature in 1984 and became the Mayo County Library's first writer-in-residence in 1987–1988.
[5] Mulkerns was married to the writer Maurice Kennedy, and edited a posthumous collection of his work, The Way to Vladivostok, in 2000.
She lived outside Dublin, and frequently broadcast on Sunday Miscellany, a programme of writers’ original reflections on RTÉ.