Irish Biography

Lyn Madden worked for twenty years as a prostitute, mostly in Dublin. Her career ended the night that she watched, her lover and pimp, John Cullen throw a firebomb through...

In the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin. Thus...

Margaret Skinnider enters and exits the history books as the female rebel who was wounded commanding a military action in the 1916 Rising. In a re-evaluation of Skinnider's long and...

'If you are hungry for truth and beauty, read this book' Roisin Ingle, The Irish Times'A demonstration of a will to live that is breathtaking ... a work of documentary...

Alexander Williams was the first artist to open the West of Ireland, particularly Achill Island, to a wide audience. His extensive collection of memoirs and papers, preserved and never made...

Following last year's bestselling collection of interviews from the RTE TV series The Meaning of Life, Gay Byrne is back with more big questions - and more interesting answers.With Peter...

10... 9... 8... 7... 6... That's about as far as you get, counting backwards, as you wait for surgery to begin - and that's all most people know about what...

A collection of personal reminiscences of James Joyce by some of his friends and contemporaries which give a deep insight into the character of the man and bring to light...

No British statesman of the nineteenth century reached the same level of international fame as Lord Castlereagh, or won as much respect from the great powers of Europe or America....

This volume, a reissue of the 1990 edition of Jeffares's biography of Yeats, with a new introduction and bibliography, is an account of Yeats's life and work. It features a...

Patrick Deeley's train journey home to rural East Galway in autumn 1978 was a pilgrimage of grief: his giant of a father had been felled, the hurley-making workshop silenced. From...

Traumatised by a terrible event in her childhood, Carla van Raay entered a convent at the age of eighteen. Expecting to find understanding and inner peace amongst her fellow nuns,...

Written in a style familiar to his millions of listeners, rich with warmth and irony, MUSTN'T GRUMBLE is Terry's definitive autobiography. Not only does he introduce the reader to post-Emergency...

We do not die alone - that's the remarkable conclusion of We'll Meet Again, an extraordinary new book by Colm Keane examining deathbed visions. The book recounts how dead parents,...

Mike Carney was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1920 in that unique, isolated Irish-speaking community. Mike left in 1937 to seek a better future in Dublin and eventually...

In her hilarious debut, Maeve Higgins smashes the brittle veneer on the creme brulee of life and hands around spoons, so we can all taste the delicious absurdity that lies...

In 1989, driven by a dream and the memory of her own past, Christina Noble travelled 6,000 miles to Vietnam, a country of great beauty where the terrible legacy of...

Uncovering the hidden love triangle between novelist Elizabeth Bowen and the author's grandparents - the critically acclaimed biography with never-before-seen letters detailing the affair.For readers who were swept up in...

The behind-the-scenes story of an innocent man, arrested and imprisoned in Iran and finally released after 222 daysBernard Phelan was working for an Iranian tour operator when he was arrested...

This entertaining and lively memoir describes the characters, landscapes and formative events during Ireland's remarkable late twentieth century renaissance. Starting with a nostalgic reflection on his upbringing in a historically...

When seventy-year-old Maura Murphy discovered she had cancer, she left her husband of fifty years and started writing her memoirs. Born 'chronically ugly and as cross as a briar' into...