Evelyn Conlon

Last updated

Evelyn Conlon
Born1952 (age 69–70)
OccupationNovelist and Short Story Writer
LanguageEnglish
NationalityIrish
GenreFiction, Novel, Short Story
Children2

Evelyn Conlon (born 1952) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, and essayist. Over the course of her career, Conlon has published dozens of novels, short stories, and essays. Her 2003 novel, Skin of Dreams, was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year. [1]

Contents

Conlon is a member of Aosdána and has been appointed a writer-in-residence at educational institutions around the world, including the University College Dublin, the University of Minnesota, and Mishkanot Sha’anamin, Jerusalem. [2] [3] She is an adjunct professor in the creative writing MFA program at Carlow University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. [4]

A member of Irishwomen United, Conlon was a founding member of the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in 1979. [5] [6]

Biography

Conlon was born in Rockcorry, County Monaghan, where she spent her childhood. [7] She was educated at St. Patrick's College in Maynooth and briefly attended University College Dublin. [8]

At the age of 19, Conlon went to Australia by ship in 1972 and worked at various jobs around the country. [9] When she returned to Ireland by bus overland in 1975, she gave birth to her first child, returned to education at Maynooth College, where she also started a child care center (creche). While earning her degree, she gave birth to her second child and separated from her husband. [9]

Conlon resides in Dublin [10] with her partner Fintan Valley, a musician, author, and ethnomusicologist.[ citation needed ]

Writing

Conlon said that she developed a passion to "be a novelist before [she] knew what a novel was." [8]

She received her first accolade for writing when she won the European Schools Day essay competition at the age of 17 and published her first piece of writing the same year in New Irish Writing at The Irish Press. [8] [9]

Some of Conlon’s fictional work explores sociopolitical issues such as capital punishment, feminism, and the plight of refugees. In observing the overlap between her writing and political advocacy, Conlon has noted, "I don’t think you can be a ‘feminist’ writer, I think you’re a writer. I am a writer who is a feminist. And, my feminist consciousness affects the sort of things I enjoy writing about." [11]

Conlon has also been described as a "politically engaged writer [who] casts a sometimes acerbic eye on the female experience in the Ireland of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century." [10]

Selected works

Novels

Short story collections

Related Research Articles

Pat Boran is an Irish poet.

Kate OBrien (novelist) Irish novelist, playwright and activist

Kate O'Brien was an Irish novelist and playwright.

Mary Dorcey,(born 1950)the author of ten books,is an Irish poet, novelist and short story writer. "Life Holds Its Breath."her latest book was published this year 2022 by Salmon Poetry. She was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for her first collection of stories "A Noise from the Woodshed.' She has won critical acclaim internationally for her portrayal of romantic and erotic relationships between women and for her subversive and tender exploration of the mother/daughter dynamic. Her most recent poetry collection, published in February 2022. is "Life Holds Its Breath."

Mary Lavin

Mary Josephine Lavin wrote short stories and novels. An Irishwoman, she is now regarded as a pioneer in the field of women's writing. The well-known Irish writer Lord Dunsany mentored Lavin after her father approached him on her behalf to discuss with him some stories she had written.

Joseph OConnor Irish novelist, born 1963

Joseph Victor O'Connor is an Irish novelist. His 2002 historical novel Star of the Sea was an international number one bestseller. Before success as an author, he was a journalist with the Sunday Tribune newspaper and Esquire magazine. He is a regular contributor to Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) and a member of the Irish artists' association Aosdána.

Clare Boylan

Clare Boylan was an Irish author, journalist and critic for newspapers, magazines and many international broadcast media.

Marita Conlon-McKenna is an Irish author of children's books and adult fiction. She is best known for her Famine-era historical children's book Under the Hawthorn Tree, the first book of the Children of the Famine trilogy, which was published in 1990 and achieved immediate success. Praised for its child-accessible yet honest depiction of the Great Famine, Under the Hawthorn Tree has been translated into over a dozen languages and is taught in classrooms worldwide. Conlon-McKenna went on to be a prolific writer and has published over 20 books for both young readers and adults. Her debut adult novel Magdalen was published in 1999.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, also known as Eilis Almquist and Elizabeth O'Hara, is an Irish novelist and short story writer who writes both in Irish and English. She has been shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, and is a recipient of the Irish PEN Award.

Claire Keegan Irish writer (born 1968)

Claire Keegan is an Irish writer known for her award-winning short stories. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, Best American Short Stories, Granta, and The Paris Review; and translated into 20 languages.

Jennifer Johnston is an Irish novelist. She has won a number of awards, including the Whitbread Book Award for The Old Jest in 1979 and a Lifetime Achievement from the Irish Book Awards (2012). The Old Jest, a novel about the Irish War of Independence, was later made into a film called The Dawning, starring Anthony Hopkins, produced by Sarah Lawson and directed by Robert Knights.

Mary Morrissy is an Irish novelist and short story writer. She writes on art, fiction, and history. Morrissy is an elected member of Aosdána, Ireland's academy of artists and writers.

Rita Ann Higgins is an Irish poet and playwright.

Elaine Feeney Irish writer

Elaine Feeney is an Irish poet, novelist, and playwright. Her writing focuses on "the central themes of history, national identity, and state institutions, and she examines how these forces structure the everyday lives of Irish women". A former slam poetry winner, she has been described as "an experienced writer who has been wrestling with poetry on page and on stage since 2006" and in 2015 was heralded as "one of the most provocative poets to come out of Ireland in the last decade". Her work has been widely translated, including into Italian, Lithuanian, and Slovene.

Val Mulkerns was an Irish writer and member of Aosdána. Her first novel, A Time Outworn, was released to critical acclaim in Ireland in 1952, followed by a series of novels and short stories in the 1970s and 1980s. Mulkerns continued to publish until she died. She also worked as a journalist and columnist and was often heard on the radio.

Eithne Strong Irish writer

Eithne Strong was a bilingual Irish poet and writer who wrote in both Irish and English. Her first poems in Irish were published in Combhar and An Glor 1943-44 under the name Eithne Ni Chonaill. She was a founder member of the Runa Press whose early Chapbooks featured artwork by among others Jack B. Yeats, Sean Keating, Sean O'Sullivan, Harry Kernoff among others. The press was noted for the publication in 1943 of Marrowbone Lane by Robert Collis which depicts the fierce fighting that took place during the Easter Rising of 1916.

Mary O'Donnell is an Irish novelist and poet, a journalist, broadcaster and teacher.

Anne Haverty is an Irish novelist and poet. Haverty was educated at Trinity College Dublin and the Sorbonne and in 1992 won a scholarship to the European Film School at Ebeltoft in Denmark. Among Haverty's novels, One Day as a Tiger won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1997.

Liz Nugent is an Irish novelist, born in Dublin in 1967. She is the author of four crime fiction novels.

Christine Dwyer Hickey is an Irish novelist, short story writer and playwright. Her writing was described by Madeleine Kingsley of the Jewish Chronicle as "depicting the parts of human nature that are oblique, suppressed and rarely voiced".

Rosaleen McDonagh is an activist, playwright and Irish Traveller.

References

  1. ↑ "Not the Same Sky". Wakefieldpress.com.au.
  2. ↑ "Evelyn Conlon". Aosdána.artscouncil.ie.
  3. ↑ "Evelyn Conlon". Shortstoryconference.org. East China Normal University, Shanghai.
  4. ↑ "A-Z Index". Carlow.edu.
  5. ↑ Connolly, Linda Mary (1997). "From Revolution to Devolution: A Social Movements Analysis of the Contemporary Women's Movement in Ireland (Dissertation)" (PDF). National University of Ireland, Maynooth.
  6. ↑ "A big thinker with a bigger vision". The Irish Times. 16 April 2005.
  7. ↑ "The cupla focal". The Irish Times. 8 April 2000.
  8. 1 2 3 Ní Dhuinn, Siún (2 February 2008). "Revealing the Writer" (PDF). UCD Today. University College Dublin. p. 11.
  9. 1 2 3 Gallego, Melania Terrazas (June 2017). "I Have Always Been a Writer": An Interview with Evelyn Conlon". ATLANTIS Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 39 (1): 207–219. Retrieved 28 February 2019.
  10. 1 2 "Evelyn Conlon". Dublincity.ie. 2011.
  11. ↑ Caneda-Cabrera, M. Teresa (15 March 2017). "Women on the Move: Mobility in Evelyn Conlon's Fiction". Estudios Irlandeses (12): 26–38. doi: 10.24162/EI2017-6777 . Retrieved 28 February 2019.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.