Irish Biography

The past they tried to hide. His mother died from cancer in 1955. His father committed suicide shortly thereafter. Paddy Doyle was sentenced in an Irish district court to be...

David Norris is one of Ireland's most popular, colourful and charismatic public figures. Not a man to shy away from controversy, he has spent most of his adult life challenging...

Seeking solitude after personal crisis, Anita Fennelly spent a summer alone on the Great Blasket Island. This is her account, written by candlelight, of the gradual thawing of her personal...

'And then there was Rose ...' - five little words that catapulted Wexford woman, Patricia Quinn, into a dedicated search for information about the great-aunt she never knew. Rose Quinn...

Cal McCrystal takes the reader on two overlapping, very poignant journeys in Northern Ireland. One journey traverses the years and experiences of his childhood, and the other retraces some of...

Danny Ellis was a survivor, strong and resilient. A successful singer/songwriter, he was proud of the way he'd `handled' his painful past: the grinding poverty of the 1950s Dublin slums,...

Horgan identifies the many false trails and omissions in Borwne's autobiography, Against The Tide, and gives us the first rounded picture of a complex, tortured and gifted individual. * First...

From one of Irelands most respected singers comes her story of a lifetimes joys and pains, the shaping of her relationship with God and the most personal thing to her:...

He could tell you things! Things I've tried to forget; thing I never did know." Joseph Conrad "...his was a heroic nature. I should like to write upon him subtly,...

Following on from the success of 'The Speckled People', Hugo Hamilton's new memoir has at its heart the story of a summer he spent working at a local harbour in...

Born into a middle-class family in 1930s Dublin, Tim Pat Coogan grew up against a background of highly charged political activity in Ireland. He went on to play a vital...

A biography of Richard Brinsley Sheridan, the writer of "The School for Scandal" and "The Rivals". The text argues that Sheridan's Irishness was a crucial factor in his drive for...

In June 1934, W. B. Yeats gratefully received the award of a Goethe-Plakette from Oberburgermeister Krebs, four months after his early play The Countess Cathleen had been produced in Frankfurt...

The Last of the Bald Heads is Ferdia Mac Anna's remembering of his remarkable youth - from the trials and tribulations of growing up in a bohemian household in Howth...

Cowslips and Chainies is a poignant memoir of childhood in 1930s and early '40s Dublin. Best-selling novelist Elaine Crowley's account of tenement life is by turns hilarious and intensely sad....

50th Anniversary Edition. Paperback.'In the sharply formal conversations of the stonemen, the bittersweet flavour of provincial Ireland is presented with neither sentiment nor adornment.' -William Trevor, The Guardian'The men who...

As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his...

Back in the last weeks of February, which now feels like a hundred years ago, we here in Innishannon were busy planning what was termed 'The Big Rake Off' of...