Beirne is the writer in residence for the 2008-2009 academical year at the University of New Brunswick, where he previously worked in the English Department. He is a Fiction Editor of The Fiddlehead, Canada’s longest surviving literary magazine. He also curates the on-line magazines The Irish Literary Times and The New Brunswick Literary Times.
Beirne’s collection of poetry, Digging My Own Grave, published by Dedalus Press, is runner-up for the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. His story, “Sightings of Bono”, is adapted for Irish film and features Bono of the Irish rock band U2. His most recent collection of poems, Games of Chance – A Gambler’s Manual, is published by Oberon Press, Fall 2011.
Beirne’s CD of spoken word poetry, If it’s words you’re after, is released in 2006. He is a past winner of two Sunday Tribune/Hennessey Literary Awards including as New Irish Writer of the Year 1996. His collaboration with classical composer Siobhán Cleary, Hum!, is called “a theatrical tour de force” by The Irish Times.
In 2009, Oberon Press published Beirne’s second novel, Turtle.
Beirne’s first short story collection, In a Time of Drought and Hunger, is published in 2015 and is a shortlisted nominee for the 2016 Danuta Gleed Literary Award.
Brady is a zealous promoter of the Glorious Revolution and suffers for his beliefs in consequence. When the Williamite War in Ireland breaks out in 1690, he, by his influence, thrice prevented the burning of the town of Bandon, after James II gives orders for its destruction following the Capture of Bandon. The same year he is employed by the people of Bandon to lay their grievances before the Parliament of England. He soon afterward settles in London, where he obtains various preferments. At the time of his death, he holds the livings of Clapham and Richmond.
Brady’s best-known work, written with his collaborator Nahum Tate, is New Version of the Psalms of David, a metrical version of the Psalms. It is licensed in 1696 and largely ousts the old Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter. His ode Hail! Bright Cecilia, based on a similar ode by John Dryden, is written in 1692 in honour of the feast day of Saint Cecilia, patron saint of musicians. It is set to music by Henry Purcell in 1697. Like Dryden, he also translates Virgil‘s Aeneid, and writes several smaller poems and dramas, as well as sermons.
Brady marries Letitia Synge and has four sons and four daughters. He dies on May 20, 1726, and is buried in the church at Richmond, London. Notable descendants of Brady include Maziere Brady, Lord Chancellor of Ireland.
(Pictured: “Portrait of Nicholas Brady (1659-1726),” oil on canvas by Hugh Howard (1675-1737), circa 1715, National Gallery of Ireland)
John Arden, English playwright, is born in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, England, on October 26, 1930. At the time of his death he is lauded as “one of the most significant British playwrights of the late 1950s and early 60s.”
Arden is initially associated with the English Stage Company at the Royal Court Theatre in London. His 1959 play, Serjeant Musgrave’s Dance, in which four army deserters arrive in a northern mining town to exact retribution for an act of colonial violence, is considered to be his best. His work is influenced by Bertolt Brecht and epic theatre as in Left-Handed Liberty (1965, on the anniversary of Magna Carta). Other plays include Live Like Pigs, The Workhouse Donkey, and Armstrong’s Last Goodnight, the last of which is performed at the 1963 Chichester Festival by the Royal National Theatre after it was rejected by the Royal Court.
Arden’s 1978 radio play Pearl is considered in a Guardian survey to be one of the best plays in that medium. He also writes several novels, including Silence Among the Weapons, which is shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1982, and Books of Bale, about the Protestant apologist John Bale. He is a member of the Royal Society of Literature.
With his wife and co-writer Margaretta D’Arcy, Arden pickets the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) premiere of his Arthurian play The Island of the Mighty, because they believe the production to be pro-imperialist. They write several plays together which are highly critical of British presence in Ireland, where he and D’Arcy live from 1971 onward.
In 1961, Arden is a founder member of the anti-nuclear Committee of 100, and he also chairs the pacifist weekly Peace News. In Ireland, he is for a while a member of Official Sinn Féin. He is an advocate of civil liberties, and opposes anti-terror legislation, as demonstrated in his 2007 radio play The Scam.
Arden is elected to Aosdána in 2011 before dying in Galway, County Galway on March 28, 2012. He is waked in a wicker casket.
(Pictured: Photograph of John Arden in 1966, credit to Sam Falk/The New York Times)
Pádraic Ó Conaire, Irish writer and journalist whose production is primarily in the Irish language, dies in Dublin on October 6, 1928. In his lifetime he writes 26 books, 473 stories, 237 essays and 6 plays. His acclaimed novel Deoraíocht has been described by Angela Bourke as “the earliest example of modernist fiction in Irish.”
Ó Conaire is born in the Lobster Pot public house on the New Docks in Galway, County Galway, on February 28, 1882. His father is a publican, who owns two premises in the town., and his mother is Kate McDonagh. He is orphaned by the age of eleven. He spends a period living with his uncle in Gairfean, Ros Muc, Connemara. The area is in the Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking area) and Ó Conaire learns to speak Irish fluently.
Ó Conaire emigrates to London in 1899 where he gets a job with the Board of Education and becomes involved in the work of the Gaelic League. A pioneer in the Gaelic revival in the last century, he and Pádraig Pearse are regarded as being the two most important Irish language short story writers during the first decades of the 20th century.
Ó Conaire marries Molly Ní Mhanais, with whom he has four children: Eileen (b. 22 Feb 1905), Patrick (b. 3 Nov 1906), Kathleen (b. 24 Feb 1909), and Mary Josephine (b. 28 Jul 1911), who dies of diphtheria in 1922.
Ó Conaire returns to Ireland in 1914, leaving his family in London. Living mostly in Galway, he earns a meagre living through writing, teaching at Gaeltacht summer schools, and as an occasional organiser for the Gaelic League.
Ó Conaire dies at the age of 46 on October 6, 1928, while on a visit to Dublin, after complaining of internal pains while at the head office of the Gaelic League. His fellow poet Frederick Robert Higgins writes a celebrated Lament for Pádraic Ó Conaire.
Ó Conaire has family still living to this day in England, as well as in Galway and Canada. The Ó Conaire surname is still strong in the Ros Muc area.
Ó Conaire’s short story M’asal Beag Dubh is the inspiration for an Internet-based satire on the football transfer market. The fictitious character Masal Bugduv is created. The name sounds similar to the Gaelic pronunciation of M’asal Beag Dubh. Journalists who did not fact check quite as thoroughly as they should have missed the satire and tell the world of the up-and-coming Moldovan star.
A statue of Ó Conaire’s is unveiled in 1935 by Éamon de Valera in Eyre Square in the heart of Galway City. It is popular with tourists until it is decapitated by four men in 1999. It is repaired at a cost of £50,000 and moved to Galway City Museum in 2004. A bronze replica of the statue is unveiled in Eyre Square in November 2017.
Michael George Mulhall, Irish author, statistician, economist and newspaper editor, is born in Dublin on September 29, 1836. He co-founds the Buenos Aires Standard, which in 1862 becomes the first English-language newspaper to be published daily in South America. He co-authors the first English-language book published in that continent, The Handbook of the River Plate, a work that goes to six editions, is widely consulted by immigrants and is now a historical sourcebook. His Dictionary of Statistics (1883 and later editions) becomes a standard work of reference.
Mulhall is the third son of Thomas Mulhall. He is educated for the priesthood at the Pontifical Irish College, Rome, but not having the vocation emigrates to Argentina to work with his brother Edward Thomas Mulhall, then a large sheep farmer in that country. In 1861 the Mulhall brothers found the Buenos Aires Standard, which in the next year becomes a daily. It is the preferred newspaper of the Anglo-Argentine community and claims to be the only English-language daily newspaper to be published south of the equator. A third brother, Francis Healey Mulhall, also emigrates to Argentina and founds the Southern Cross, a newspaper of the Irish-Argentine community.
By 1864 Mulhall, despite his relative youth, is regarded as a spokesman for the entire British community in the region.
In 1878 (1868 by another source) Mulhall marries Marion McMurrough Murphy, herself an author whose works include Between the Amazon and the Andes (1881) and Explorers in the New World (1909). She cooperates with him closely on his statistical work.
Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, American novelist, essayist, short story and screenwriter, is born into an Irish Catholic family on September 24, 1896, in Saint Paul, Minnesota. He is best known for his novels depicting the flamboyance and excess of the Jazz Age, a term he popularized. During his lifetime, he publishes four novels, four collections of short stories, and 164 short stories. Although he achieves temporary popular success and fortune in the 1920s, he receives critical acclaim only after his death and is now widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.
The son of middle-class Irish Catholics Edward and Mary McQuillan Fitzgerald, Fitzgerald is raised primarily in New York. He attends Princeton University but owing to a failed relationship with socialite Ginevra King and a preoccupation with writing, he drops out in 1917 to join the United States Army. While stationed in Alabama, he romances Zelda Sayre, a Southern debutante who belongs to Montgomery‘s exclusive country-club set. Although she rejects Fitzgerald initially, because of his lack of financial prospects, she agrees to marry him after he publishes the commercially successful This Side of Paradise (1920). The novel becomes a cultural sensation and cements his reputation as one of the eminent writers of the decade.
Fitzgerald’s second novel, The Beautiful and Damned (1922), propels him further into the cultural elite. To maintain his affluent lifestyle, he writes numerous stories for popular magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s: The National Weekly, and Esquire. During this period, he frequents Europe, where he befriends modernist writers and artists of the “Lost Generation” expatriate community, including Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, The Great Gatsby (1925), receives generally favorable reviews but is a commercial failure, selling fewer than 23,000 copies in its first year. Despite its lackluster debut, The Great Gatsby is now widely praised, with some labeling it the “Great American Novel.” Following the deterioration of his wife’s mental health and her placement in a mental institute for schizophrenia, he completes his final novel, Tender Is the Night (1934).
Struggling financially because of the declining popularity of his works amid the Great Depression, Fitzgerald turns to Hollywood, writing and revising screenplays. While living in Hollywood, he cohabits with columnist Sheilah Graham, his final companion before his death. After a long struggle with alcoholism, he attains sobriety only to die of a heart attack on December 21, 1940, at the age of 44. His friend Edmund Wilson completes and publishes an unfinished fifth novel, The Last Tycoon (1941), after Fitzgerald’s death.
At the time of his death, the Roman Catholic Church denies the family’s request that Fitzgerald, a non-practicing Catholic, be buried in the family plot in the Catholic St. Mary’s Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. He is buried instead with a simple Protestant service at Rockville Union Cemetery. When Zelda Fitzgerald dies in a fire at the Highland Mental Hospital in 1948, she is originally buried next to him at Rockville Union. In 1975, Fitzgerald’s daughter Scottie successfully petitions to have the earlier decision revisited, and her parents’ remains are moved to the family plot in Saint Mary’s.
Michael Hartnett, Irish poet who writes in both English and Irish, is born in Croom Hospital in Croom, County Limerick, on September 18, 1941. He is one of the most significant voices in late 20th-century Irish writing and has been called “Munster‘s de facto poet laureate.”
Although Hartnett’s parents’ name is Harnett, he is registered in error as Hartnett on his birth certificate. In later life he declines to change this as his legal name is closer to the Irish Ó hAirtnéide. He grows up in the Maiden Street area of Newcastle West, County Limerick, spending much of his time with his grandmother, Bridget Halpin, who resides in the townland of Camas, in the countryside nearby. He claims that his grandmother is one of the last native speakers to live in County Limerick, though she is originally from northern County Kerry. Although she speaks to him mainly in English, he listens to her conversing with her friends in Irish, and as such, he is quite unaware of the imbalances between English and Irish. When he begins school, he is made aware of the tensions between both languages, and is surprised to discover that Irish is considered an endangered language, taught as a contrived, rule-laden code, with little of the literary attraction which it holds for him. He is educated in the local national and secondary schools in Newcastle West. He emigrates to England the day after he finishes his secondary education and goes to work as a tea boy on a building site in London.
Hartnett has started writing by this time and his work comes to be known of the poet John Jordan, who is professor of English at University College Dublin. Jordan invites him to attend the university for a year. While back in Dublin, he co-edits the literary magazine Arena with James Liddy. He also works as curator of James Joyce‘s tower at Sandycove for a time. He returns briefly to London, where he meets Rosemary Grantley on May 16, 1965, and they are married on April 4, 1966. His first book, Anatomy of a Cliché, is published by Poetry Ireland in 1968 to critical acclaim and he returns to live permanently in Dublin that same year.
Hartnett works as a night telephonist at the telephone exchange on Exchequer Street. He now enters a productive relationship with New Writers Press, run by Michael Smith and Trevor Joyce. They publish his next three books. The first of these is a translation from the Irish, The Old Hag of Beare (1969), followed by Selected Poems (1970) and Tao (1972). This last book is a version of the Chinese Tao Te Ching. His Gypsy Ballads (1973), a translation of the Romancero Gitano of Federico García Lorca, is published by the Goldsmith Press.
In 1974 Hartnett decides to leave Dublin and return to his rural roots, as well as deepen his relationship with the Irish language. He goes to live in Templeglantine, five miles from Newcastle West, and works for a time as a lecturer in creative writing at Thomond College of Education, Limerick.
In his 1975 book, A Farewell to English, Hartnett declares his intention to write only in Irish in the future, describing English as “the perfect language to sell pigs in.” A number of volumes in Irish follow including Adharca Broic (1978), An Phurgóid (1983) and Do Nuala: Foighne Chrainn (1984). A biography on this period of his life entitled A Rebel Act Michael Hartnett’s Farewell To English by Pat Walsh is published in 2012 by Mercier Press.
In 1984 Hartnett returns to Dublin to live in the suburb of Inchicore. The following year marks his return to English with the publication of Inchicore Haiku, a book that deals with the turbulent events in his personal life over the previous few years. This is followed by a number of books in English including A Necklace of Wrens (1987), Poems to Younger Women (1989) and The Killing of Dreams (1992).
Hartnett also continues working in Irish, and produces a sequence of important volumes of translation of classic works into English. These include Ó Bruadair, Selected Poems of Dáibhí Ó Bruadair (1985) and Ó Rathaille The Poems of Aodhaghán Ó Rathaille (1999). His Collected Poems appear in two volumes in 1984 and 1987 and New and Selected Poems in 1995.
Hartnett dies from Alcoholic Liver Syndrome on October 13, 1999. A new Collected Poems appears in 2001.
Every April a literary and arts festival is held in Newcastle West in honour of Hartnett. Events are organised throughout the town and a memorial lecture is given by a distinguished guest. Former speakers include Nuala O’Faolain, Paul Durcan, David Whyte and Fintan O’Toole. The annual Michael Hartnett Poetry Award of € 4,000 also forms part of the festival. Funded by the Limerick City and County Council Arts Office and the Arts Council of Ireland, it is intended to support and encourage poets in the furtherance of their writing endeavours. Previous winners include Sinéad Morrissey and Peter Sirr.
During the 2011 Éigse, Paul Durcan unveils a bronze life-sized statue of Hartnett sculpted by Rory Breslin, in the Square, Newcastle West. Hartnett’s son Niall speaks at the unveiling ceremony.
Lever is the second son of James Lever, an architect and builder, and is educated in private schools. His escapades at Trinity College, Dublin (1823–1828), where he earns a degree in medicine in 1831, are drawn on for the plots of some of his novels. The character Frank Webber in the novel Charles O’Malley is based on a college friend, Robert Boyle, who later becomes a clergyman. He and Boyle earn pocket-money singing ballads of their own composing in the streets of Dublin and play many other pranks which he embellishes in the novels Charles O’Malley, Con Cregan and Lord Kilgobbin.
Before seriously embarking upon his medical studies, Lever visits Canada as an unqualified surgeon on an emigrant ship. Arriving in Canada, he journeys into the backwoods, where he is affiliated to a tribe of Native Americans but has to flee because his life is in danger, as later his character Bagenal Daly does in his novel The Knight of Gwynne.
Back in Europe, Lever pretends he is a student from the University of Göttingen and travels to the University of Jena and then to Vienna. He loves German student life and several of his songs, such as “The Pope He Loved a Merry Life,” are based on student-song models. His medical degree earns him an appointment to the Board of Health in County Clare and then as a dispensary doctor in Portstewart, County Londonderry, but his conduct as a country doctor earns him the censure of the authorities.
In 1833 Lever marries his first love, Catherine Baker, and in February 1837, after varied experiences, he begins publishing The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer in the recently established Dublin University Magazine. Before Harry Lorrequer appears in volume form (1839), he has settled on the strength of a slight diplomatic connection as a fashionable physician in Brussels.
In 1842 Lever returns to Dublin to edit the Dublin University Magazine and gathers round him a typical coterie of Irish wits. In June 1842 he welcomes William Makepeace Thackeray, the author of The Snob Papers, to Templeogue, four miles southwest of Dublin, on his Irish tour. The O’Donoghue and Arthur O’Leary (1845) make his native land an impossible place for Lever to continue in. Thackeray suggests London, but Lever requires a new field of literary observation and anecdote. His creative inspiration exhausted, he decides to renew it on the continent. In 1845 he resigns his editorship and goes back to Brussels, whence he starts upon an unlimited tour of central Europe in a family coach. Now and again, he halts for a few months and entertains to the limit of his resources in some ducal castle or other which he hires for an off season.
Depressed in spirit as Lever is, his wit is unextinguished. He is still the delight of the salons with his stories, and in 1867, after a few years’ experience of a similar kind at La Spezia, he is cheered by a letter from Lord Derby offering him the more lucrative consulship of Trieste. The $600 annual salary does not atone to Lever for the lassitude of prolonged exile. Trieste, at first “all that I could desire,” became with characteristic abruptness “detestable and damnable.”
Lever’s depression, partly due to incipient heart disease, partly to the growing conviction that he is the victim of literary and critical conspiracy, is confirmed by the death of his wife on April 23, 1870, to whom he is tenderly attached. He visits Ireland in the following year and seems alternately in high and low spirits. Death had already given him one or two runaway knocks, and, after his return to Trieste, he fails gradually, dying suddenly, however, and almost painlessly, from heart failure on June 1, 1872, at his home, Villa Gasteiger. His daughters, one of whom, Sydney, is believed to have been the real author of A Rent in a Cloud (1869), are well provided for.
Banim is born in Kilkenny, County Kilkenny on August 5, 1796. He is educated at Dr. Magrath’s Catholic school. He goes on to study for the bar, but a decline in his father’s business causes him to retire from his studies. He returns home to take over the family business, which he returns to prosperity, restoring his parents to comfort, both material and mental. In 1826 he visits John in London, making the acquaintance of many distinguished men of letters. When the struggle for Catholic emancipation is at its height, he works energetically for the cause.
Around 1822, Banim’s brother John broaches his idea for a series of national tales. He assists John in the O’Hara Tales, where he uses the name “Abel O’Hara,” and there is difficulty in allocating their respective contributions. While John is the more experienced writer, Michael provides material based on his social observations. They revise each other’s work. He writes in such hours as he can snatch from business and is the principal author of about thirteen out of the twenty-four works attributed to the brothers, including Crohoore of the Bill-Hook, The Croppy, and Father Connell. He is amiable, unambitious, modest, and generous to a degree. He keeps himself in the background, letting his younger brother have all the honor of their joint production. In 1828 he has the honor of a visit from the Comte de Montalembert, who has read the O’Hara Tales and is then on a tour through Ireland.
When his brother John is struck down by illness, Banim writes and earnestly invites him to return to Kilkenny and share his home. “You speak a great deal too much,” he observes in one letter, “about what you think you owe me. As you are my brother, never allude to it again. My creed on this subject is, that one brother should not want while the other can supply him.” However, John remains in France, seeking medical care in Paris.
Following his brother’s death in 1842, Banim writes Clough Fionn (1852), and The Town of the Cascades (1864). In 1861 he writes prefaces and notes for a reprint of the “O’Hara” novels by the publishing firm William H. Sadlier, Inc. of New York City. Besides their desire to give a true picture of their country, still crippled and prostrate from the effects of the Penal Laws, the Banims are undoubtedly influenced by the Romantic movement, then at its height.
In 1840, Banim marries Catherine O’Dwyer with whom he has two daughters, Mathilde and Mary. Although a man of means, in less than a year he loses almost the whole of his fortune through the failure of a merchant. Poor health follows. He is appointed postmaster of Kilkenny in 1852, a position he holds until illness forces him to retire in 1873. He also serves a term as mayor. His health failing, he goes with his family to reside at Booterstown, near Dublin, where he dies on August 30, 1874. His widow is granted a civil list pension.
Ó Dónaill is the olderst of the six children of Tarlach Ó Dónaill and Éilis Nic Ruairí from Grial, Loughanure. They own a little land and a few cows. His father spends June to November working in Scotland and dies when he is 13 years old. He himself spends summers working in the tunnels in Scotland.
Ó Dónaill receives his education at Scoil Loch an Iúir in Loughanure before gaining a scholarship to St. Eunan’s College in Letterkenny. Another scholarship takes him to University College Dublin to study Irish, English and History. During his time in university Ó Dónaill spends his summers teaching at Coláiste Bhríde in Rann na Feirste, County Donegal.
Ó Dónaill writes the book Bruigheann Féile which is based on stories of pastimes in the Gaeltacht town Loughanure and its surrounding area. His book Na Glúnta Rosannacha is first published in 1952.
Ó Dónaill is most famous for his work as editor of the 1977 Irish-English dictionary Foclóir Gaeilge-Béarla, which is still widely used today.
seamus dubhghaill 