Irish Authors

In honor of St. Patrick’s Day, I chose 10 Irish authors of note to recognize. The endeavor was educational, as I didn’t know several were Irish. There’s no order or ranking.

1. Abraham Stoker – Better known as Bram Stoker created villainous vampire, Dracula. Also wrote The Lair of the White Worm and The Lady of the Shroud.
2. James Joyce – Considered one of the most influential authors of the 20^th Most famous works: Ulysses, A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Finnegan’s Wake, The Dead.
3. Jonathan Swift – Every word Swift wrote was chosen to express the opinionated sarcasm in his works. Notable works: Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub.
4. Samuel Beckett – Known as one of the most influential playwrights, poets, and novelists of the 20th century. Writing in both English and in French, his writing is known to express a bleak outlook on human life and culture while incorporating gallows humor and black comedy. Notable works: Waiting for Godot (play), Molloy.
5. Anne Enright (born 1962). Pulitzer-prize winner Enright is famous for her novels, short stories, and essay collections about familial relationships, love, sex, and Ireland’s culture and the obstacles the country has overcome. Notable works: The Gathering, The Wig My Father Wore, Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood.
6. Oscar Wilde – After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, Wilde became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s. Today he is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death. Other notable works: Salome, The Ideal Husband, The Importance of Being Earnest.
7. George Bernard Shaw – Wrote more than sixty plays, including major works such as Man and Superman, Pygmalion (the film My Fair Lady is a musical of the story), and Saint Joan. With a range incorporating both contemporary satire and historical allegory, Shaw became the leading dramatist of his generation, and in 1925 was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
8. Edna O’Brien (born 1930) – A novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet, and short story writer. Her works often revolve around the feelings of women, and their problems in relating to men, and to society. Her first novel, The Country Girls, is often credited with breaking the silence on sexual matters and social issues during a repressive period in Ireland following WWII. The book was banned, burned, and denounced from the pulpit and O’Brien left Ireland behind. Notable works: The Country Girls, Saints and Sinners.
9. Eimear McBride (born 1976) – An Irish novelist whose debut novel, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, won the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize in 2013 and the 2014 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction. Published her second novel, The Lesser Bohemians, in 2016.
10. Emma Donoghue (born 1969) – Donoghue’s second book for younger readers, The Lotterys More Or Less, illustrated by Caroline Hadilaksono and coming in Autumn 2018, is a sequel to The Lotterys Plus One. Her book, Room, became a feature film, winning a Best Actress Oscar for Brie Larson. Other notable works: The Wonder, Astray.

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