Aspiring writers are often told to write about what they know and while Dundalk-born Austin Duffy has left the aspiring label behind, he still writes about what he knows best.
An oncologist and cancer researcher, his acclaimed debut novel This Living and Immortal Thing saw him writing about breast cancer. In his new book, the wife of the central character has died of ovarian cancer and as the story develops, it becomes clear that her widower is also ill. It s inevitable that the stuff you know about and what you spend your time dealing with is going to find its way into your writing, he said.
Edna O Brien.
Celebrated, controversial, talented, a national icon. All or any of these would describe one of Ireland’s foremost ladies of literature, Edna O’Brien. Recently, to celebrate her 90th birthday, a diptych portrait by photographer Mandy O’Neill was unveiled at the National Gallery of Ireland.
The commission, by the 2018 Zurich Portrait Prize winner O’Neill, has been added to the national portrait collection and is a most worthy inclusion. O’Neill’s commission followed her success in the competition with the evocative Diane, Larkin Community College.
Diane, Larkin Community College, 2018 by Mandy O Neill.
Mandy O’Neill is an Irish visual artist working primarily in the fields of photography, installation and text. Her practice draws on themes of youth, community and institutions, and she has a particular interest in the dynamics between people and place. Over the past decade she has worked within educational and community settings, and in particular with
th birthday this week to huge plaudits from the global literary world.
President Michael D Higgins described the novelist as one of the finest chroniclers of Irish life.
Widely regarded as Ireland’s greatest living writer, Ms O’Brien marked her birthday with the delivery of the TS Eliot lecture on Eliot and James Joyce for The Abbey Theatre. The piece was recorded at the Irish Embassy in London and broadcast on Tuesday evening (December 15).
Ms O’Brien’s debut novel
The County Girls convulsed 1960s Ireland with its honest representation of female sexuality and small town communities. Despite the reaction, Ms O’Brien in an interview in 1970 with RTÉ expressed warm feelings fro the county. “I would not want to have come from anywhere else despite certain inconveniences which I haven’t omitted to remember,” she said.