Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known writers. His thirteen previous novels include The Journey Home, Father’s Music, The Valparaiso Voyage, The Family on Paradise Pier, A Second Life, New Town Soul, The Fall of Ireland, Tanglewood, The Lonely Sea and Sky and his most recent An Ark of Light, published in 2018. 

His first play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, received the Samuel Beckett Award and one of his Edinburgh Fringe First Awards. His numerous other plays include The Ballymun Trilogy – which charts forty years of life in a Dublin working class suburb; Walking the Road, about the death of the Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge, during World War One; The Parting Glass and a stage adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses, which has toured China.

He is also a poet; his ninth collection of poems, The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss, was published in 2012, and his New and Selected Poems, That Which is Suddenly Precious, appeared in 2015. While in 2020 he wrote his first and only collection of short stories, Secrets Never Told.

He devised the bestselling collaborative novels, Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel, to which many of Ireland’s best known writers anonymously contributed chapters.

As an 18-year-old factory hand, he founded the radical Raven Arts Press which first published many of his contemporaries. He closed this press in 1992 to co-found New Island Books – one of Ireland’s leading publishers. He has edited numerous anthologies, including The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. A former Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin and Playwright in Association with the Abbey Theatre, Bolger writes for most of Ireland’s leading newspapers and in 2012 was named Commentator of the Year at the Irish Newspaper awards. 

 

Photo credit: Peter O'Doherty