Brendan Behan
Early association with the Irish republican army and experiences in prison influenced works, including The Quare Fellow , the play of 1954, and the autobiographical Borstal Boy in 1958 of Brendan Francis Behan, writer.
Brendan Francis Behan composed poetry, short stories, and novels in English. He also volunteered.
A mother in the inner city of Dublin bore Brendan Francis Behan into an educated class family. Christine English, his grandmother, owned a number of properties in the area and the house on Russell street near Mountjoy square. Peadar Kearney, his uncle and author of song and the national anthem, also lived in the area. Stephen Behan, his father, acted in the war of independence, painted houses, and read classic literature t
If you like author Brendan Behan here is the list of authors you may also like
Buy books on AmazonTotal similar authors (29)
-
-
Walter Greenwood
Greenwood was born in Hanky Park, in Pendleton, Salford, Lancashire, the son of radical working class parents. His father died when he was nine, and his mother supported him by working as a waitress. Like many children he left school at the age of 13 to work (as a pawnbroker's clerk). He took a succession of low paid jobs, and continued to educate himself in Salford Public Library. During periods of unemployment he worked for the local Labour Party and began to write short stories.
Buy books on Amazon
While unemployed, he wrote his first novel, Love on the Dole, in 1932. It was about the destructive social effects of poverty in his home town. After several rejections, it was published in 1933. It was a critical and commercial success, and a huge influence on th -
Michael Magee
Michael Magee was born and grew up in West Belfast. He is the fiction editor of The Tangerine, and his work has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, and The Lifeboat, and in The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Writing. He recently received his PhD in creative writing from Queen’s University, Belfast.
Buy books on Amazon
In 2014, he published his first novel, The Blame, with Salt Publishing under the name Michael Nolan.
His second novel, Close to Home, was published by Hamish Hamilton in 2023. -
Donal Ryan
Donal Ryan is the author of the novels The Spinning Heart, The Thing About December, the short-story collection A Slanting of the Sun, and the forthcoming novel All We Shall Know. He holds a degree in Law from the University of Limerick, and worked for the National Employment Rights Authority before the success of his first two novels allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career.
Buy books on Amazon -
Paul Murray
Paul Murray is an Irish novelist. He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin and has written two novels: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize in 2003, and nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award) and Skippy Dies (longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and the 2010 Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Award for comic fiction).
Buy books on Amazon -
J.M. Synge
Edmund John Millington Synge (pronounced /sɪŋ/) was an Irish playwright, poet, prose writer, and collector of folklore. He was one of the cofounders of the Abbey Theatre. He is best known for the play The Playboy of the Western World, which caused riots during its opening run at the Abbey theatre. Synge wrote many well known plays, including "Riders to the Sea", which is often considered to be his strongest literary work.
Buy books on Amazon
Although he came from an Anglo-Irish background, Synge's writings are mainly concerned with the world of the Roman Catholic peasants of rural Ireland and with what he saw as the essential paganism of their world view. -
Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of two collections of short stories, and the novel City of Bohane, which was the winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Buy books on Amazon -
Richard Balls
Richard is a die-hard music fan and the author of three music-related books: A Furious Devotion: The Authorised Story of Shane MacGowan; Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story, and Sex & Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll: The Life Of Ian Dury.
Buy books on Amazon
He was a news journalist for 20 years, spending almost half of that time working for national papers in Ireland, and frequently covered crime and politics. For the past 14 years he has worked in communications.
A passionate supporter of Norwich City Football Club, he lives in the city, and is married with two daughters. -
John Braine
John Gerard Braine was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in 1922. He sprang to immediate fame in 1957 with publication of his first novel, Room at the Top, which was a critical success and a major bestseller in England and America and was adapted for the screen in an Oscar-winning 1959 film starring Simone Signoret and Laurence Harvey. His second novel, The Vodi (1959), met with mixed reviews and a disappointing reception, but was Braine’s favourite of his own works. His next book, Life at the Top (1962), a sequel to Room at the Top, sold well and was filmed in 1965.
Buy books on Amazon
Braine, who was commonly associated with what the British media dubbed the ‘Angry Young Men’ movement of working-class writers disenchanted with the traditional British class system, -
Claire Keegan
Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Wicklow. She completed her undergraduate studies at Loyola University, New Orleans, Louisiana and subsequently earned an MA at The University of Wales and an M.Phil at Trinity College, Dublin.
Buy books on Amazon
Her first collection of stories, Antarctica, was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Her second, Walk the Blue Fields, was Richard Ford’s book of the year. Her works have won several awards including The Hugh Leonard Bursary, The Macaulay Fellowship, The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, The Martin Healy Prize, The Olive Cook Award, The Kilkenny Prize, The Tom Gallon Award and The William Trevor Prize, judged by William Trevor. Twice was Keegan the recipient of the Francis MacManus Award. She was also a Wingate -
Patrick Radden Keefe
Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Slate, New York, and The New York Review of Books. He received the 2014 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, for his story "A Loaded Gun," was a finalist for the National Magazine Award for Reporting in 2015 and 2016, and is also the recipient of an Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fellowship at the New America Foundation and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
Buy books on Amazon -
Charles Brandt
Charles Peter Brandt was an American investigator, lawyer, writer, and speaker. He wrote the narrative non-fiction Frank Sheeran memoir I Heard You Paint Houses, the basis for the 2019 film The Irishman, directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci.
Buy books on Amazon -
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy (Russian: Лев Николаевич Толстой; most appropriately used Liev Tolstoy; commonly Leo Tolstoy in Anglophone countries) was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist fiction. Many consider Tolstoy to have been one of the world's greatest novelists. Tolstoy is equally known for his complicated and paradoxical persona and for his extreme moralistic and ascetic views, which he adopted after a moral crisis and spiritual awakening in the 1870s, after which he also became noted as a moral thinker and soc
Buy books on Amazon -
Patrick McCabe
Patrick McCabe came to prominence with the publication of his third adult novel, The Butcher Boy, in 1992; the book was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in Britain and won the Irish Times-Aer Lingus Prize for fiction. McCabe's strength as an author lies in his ability to probe behind the veneer of respectability and conformity to reveal the brutality and the cloying and corrupting stagnation of Irish small-town life, but he is able to find compassion for the subjects of his fiction. His prose has a vitality and an anti-authoritarian bent, using everyday language to deconstruct the ideologies at work in Ireland between the early 1960s and the late 1970s. His books can be read as a plea for a pluralistic Irish culture that can encompass the p
Buy books on Amazon -
Brian Friel
Brian Friel is a playwright and, more recently, director of his own works from Ireland who now resides in County Donegal.
Buy books on Amazon
Friel was born in Omagh County Tyrone, the son of Patrick "Paddy" Friel, a primary school teacher and later a borough councillor in Derry, and Mary McLoone, postmistress of Glenties, County Donegal (Ulf Dantanus provides the most detail regarding Friel's parents and grandparents, see Books below). He received his education at St. Columb's College in Derry and the seminary at St. Patrick's College, Maynooth (1945-48) from which he received his B.A., then he received his teacher's training at St. Mary's Training College in Belfast, 1949-50. He married Anne Morrison in 1954, with whom he has four daughters and one son; they -
J.L. Carr
Carr was born in Thirsk Junction, Carlton Miniott, Yorkshire, into a Wesleyan Methodist family. His father Joseph, the eleventh son of a farmer, went to work for the railways, eventually becoming a station master for the North Eastern Railway. Carr was given the same Christian name as his father and the middle name Lloyd, after David Lloyd George, the Liberal Chancellor of the Exchequer. He adopted the names Jim and James in adulthood. His brother Raymond, who was also a station master, called him Lloyd.
Buy books on Amazon
Carr's early life was shaped by failure. He attended the village school at Carlton Miniott. He failed the scholarship exam, which denied him a grammar school education, and on finishing his school career he also failed to gain admission to t -
Knut Hamsun
Novels of Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun (born Knud Pedersen), include Hunger (1890) and The Growth of the Soil (1917). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1920.
Buy books on Amazon
He insisted on the intricacies of the human mind as the main object of modern literature to describe the "whisper of the blood, and the pleading of the bone marrow." Hamsun pursued his literary program, debuting in 1890 with the psychological novel Hunger. -
Rory Stewart
Rory Stewart was born in Hong Kong and grew up in Malaysia. He served briefly as an officer in the British Army (the Black Watch), studied history and philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford and then joined the British Diplomatic Service. He worked in the British Embassy in Indonesia and then, in the wake of the Kosovo campaign, as the British Representative in Montenegro. In 2000 he took two years off and began walking from Turkey to Bangladesh. He covered 6000 miles on foot alone across Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Nepal -- a journey described in The Places in Between.
Buy books on Amazon
In 2003, he became the coalition Deputy Governor of Maysan and Dhi Qar -- two provinces in the Marsh Arab region of Southern Iraq. He has written for a range of publicatio -
Flann O'Brien
Pseudonym of Brian Ó Nualláin , also known as Brian O'Nolan.
Buy books on Amazon
His English novels appeared under the name of Flann O’Brien, while his great Irish novel and his newspaper column (which appeared from 1940 to 1966) were signed Myles na gCopaleen or Myles na Gopaleen – the second being a phonetic rendering of the first. One of twelve brothers and sisters, he was born in 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, into an Irish-speaking family. His father had learned Irish while a young man during the Gaelic revival the son was later to mock. O’Brien’s childhood has been described as happy, though somewhat insular, as the language spoken at home was not that spoken by their neighbours. The Irish language had long been in decline, and Strabane was n -
John Boyne
I was born in Dublin, Ireland, and studied English Literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. In 2015, I was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters by UEA.
Buy books on Amazon
I’ve published 14 novels for adults, 6 novels for younger readers, and a short story collection. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas was a New York Times no.1 Bestseller and was adapted for a feature film, a play, a ballet and an opera, selling around 11 million copies worldwide.
Among my most popular books are The Heart’s Invisible Furies, A Ladder to the Sky and My Brother’s Name is Jessica.
I’m also a regular book reviewer for The Irish Times.
In 2012, I was awarded the Hennessy Literary ‘Hall of Fame’ Award for my body of work. I’v -
Edna O'Brien
Edna O’Brien was an award-winning Irish author of novels, plays, and short stories. She has been hailed as one of the greatest chroniclers of the female experience in the twentieth century. She was the 2011 recipient of the Frank O’Connor Prize, awarded for her short story collection Saints and Sinners. She also received, among other honors, the Irish PEN Award for Literature, the Ulysses Medal from University College Dublin, and a lifetime achievement award from the Irish Literary Academy. Her 1960 debut novel, The Country Girls, was banned in her native Ireland for its groundbreaking depictions of female sexuality. Notable works also include August Is a Wicked Month (1965), A Pagan Place (1970), Lantern Slides (1990), and The Light of Eve
Buy books on Amazon -
Andrew O'Hagan
Andrew O'Hagan, FRSL (born 1968) is a Scottish novelist and non-fiction author.
Buy books on Amazon
He is the author of the novels Our Fathers, Personality, and Be Near Me, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize. His work has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and The Guardian (U.K.). In 2003, O’Hagan was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. He lives in London, England. -
Franz Kafka
Prague-born writer Franz Kafka wrote in German, and his stories, such as " The Metamorphosis " (1916), and posthumously published novels, including The Trial (1925), concern troubled individuals in a nightmarishly impersonal world.
Buy books on Amazon
Jewish middle-class family of this major fiction writer of the 20th century spoke German. People consider his unique body of much incomplete writing, mainly published posthumously, among the most influential in European literature.
His stories include "The Metamorphosis" (1912) and " In the Penal Colony " (1914), whereas his posthumous novels include The Trial (1925), The Castle (1926) and Amerika (1927).
Despite first language, Kafka also spoke fluent Czech. Later, Kafka acquired some knowledge of -
James Joyce
A profound influence of literary innovations of Irish writer James Augustine Aloysius Joyce on modern fiction includes his works, Ulysses (1922) and Finnegans Wake (1939).
Buy books on Amazon
Sylvia Beach published the first edition of Ulysses of James Augustine Aloysius Joyce in 1922.
John Stanislaus Joyce, an impoverished gentleman and father of James Joyce, nine younger surviving siblings, and two other siblings who died of typhoid, failed in a distillery business and tried all kinds of other professions, including politics and tax collecting. The Roman Catholic Church dominated life of Mary Jane Murray, an accomplished pianist and his mother. In spite of poverty, the family struggled to maintain a solid middle-class façade.
Jesuits at Clongowes Woo -
Pat Barker
Pat Barker is an English writer known for her fiction exploring themes of memory, trauma, and survival. She gained prominence with Union Street (1982), a stark portrayal of working-class women's lives, and later achieved critical acclaim with the Regeneration Trilogy (1991–1995), a series blending history and fiction to examine the psychological impact of World War I. The final book, The Ghost Road (1995), won the Booker Prize. In recent years, she has turned to retelling classical myths from a female perspective, beginning with The Silence of the Girls (2018). Barker's work is widely recognized for its direct and unflinching storytelling.
Buy books on Amazon -
George Orwell
Eric Arthur Blair was an English novelist, poet, essayist, journalist and critic who wrote under the pen name of George Orwell. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to all totalitarianism (both fascism and stalinism), and support of democratic socialism.
Buy books on Amazon
Orwell is best known for his allegorical novella Animal Farm (1945) and the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), although his works also encompass literary criticism, poetry, fiction and polemical journalism. His non-fiction works, including The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), documenting his experience of working-class life in the industrial north of England, and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his experiences soldiering for the Republican fact -
Seán O'Casey
Sean O'Casey was born in 1880 and lived through a bitterly hard boyhood in a Dublin tenement house. He never went to school but received most of his education in the streets of Dublin, and taught himself to read at the age of fourteen. He was successively a newspaper-seller, docker, stone-breaker, railway-worker and builders' labourer. In 1913 he helped to organise the Irish Citizen Army which fought in the streets of Dublin, and at the same time he was learning his dramatic technique by reading Shakespeare and watching the plays of Dion Boucicault. His early works were performed at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, and Lady Gregory made him welcome at Coole, but disagreement followed and after visiting America in the late thirties O'Casey settled
Buy books on Amazon -
-
Seamus Deane
Poet, critic, novelist, editor, and educator. Professor of Irish studies in Ireland and the USA. Educated at Queen's College Belfast and Pembroke College, Cambridge University, England.
Buy books on Amazon