Frank Ronan (born in May 1963 in New Ross, County Wexford) is a novelist. [1] [2] He also writes a monthly column for Gardens Illustrated magazine. His novels have won numerous prizes including the 1989 Irish Times/Aer Lingus prize. [3]
Seamus Justin Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright and translator. He received the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Among his best-known works is Death of a Naturalist (1966), his first major published volume. Heaney was and is still recognised as one of the principal contributors to poetry in Ireland during his lifetime. American poet Robert Lowell described him as "the most important Irish poet since Yeats", and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have said that he was "the greatest poet of our age". Robert Pinsky has stated that "with his wonderful gift of eye and ear Heaney has the gift of the story-teller." Upon his death in 2013, The Independent described him as "probably the best-known poet in the world".
John Hume was an Irish nationalist politician from Northern Ireland, widely regarded as one of the most important figures in the recent political history of Ireland, as one of the architects of the Northern Ireland peace process.
Fiona Shaw is an Irish film and theatre actress. She is known for her roles as Petunia Dursley in the Harry Potter film series (2001–2010), Marnie Stonebrook in the fourth season of the HBO series True Blood (2011), and Carolyn Martens in the BBC series Killing Eve (2018–22).
Paul Muldoon is an Irish poet. He has published more than thirty collections and won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the T. S. Eliot Prize. At Princeton University he is currently both the Howard G. B. Clark '21 University Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts. He held the post of Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1999 to 2004 and has also served as president of the Poetry Society (UK) and Poetry Editor at The New Yorker.
Dame Antonia Susan Duffy, known professionally by her former marriage name as A. S. Byatt, is an English critic, novelist, poet and short story writer. Her books have been widely translated, into more than thirty languages.
Josephine Edna O'Brien is an Irish novelist, memoirist, playwright, poet and short-story writer. Elected to Aosdána by her fellow artists, she was honoured with the title Saoi in 2015 and the biennial "UK and Ireland Nobel" David Cohen Prize in 2019, whilst France made her Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2021.
Roddy Doyle is an Irish novelist, dramatist and screenwriter. He is the author of eleven novels for adults, eight books for children, seven plays and screenplays, and dozens of short stories. Several of his books have been made into films, beginning with The Commitments in 1991. Doyle's work is set primarily in Ireland, especially working-class Dublin, and is notable for its heavy use of dialogue written in slang and Irish English dialect. Doyle was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 for his novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.
Darren Morgan is a Welsh former professional snooker player who now competes as an amateur.
William Trevor Cox, known by his pen name William Trevor, was an Irish novelist, playwright, and short story writer. One of the elder statesmen of the Irish literary world, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest contemporary writers of short stories in the English language.
Michael J. Kinane is an Irish former flat racing jockey. He had a 34-year career, retiring on 8 December 2009.
William John Banville is an Irish novelist, short story writer, adapter of dramas and screenwriter. Though he has been described as "the heir to Proust, via Nabokov", Banville himself maintains that W. B. Yeats and Henry James are the two real influences on his work.
Sir Michael Ronald Stoute is a Barbadian British Thoroughbred horse trainer in flat racing.
Dermot Mulroney is an American actor. He is known for his roles in romantic comedy, western, and drama films. Appearing on screen since 1986, he is known for his work in various films such as Young Guns (1988), Staying Together (1989), Where the Day Takes You (1992), Point of No Return (1993), Angels in the Outfield (1994), My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), About Schmidt (2002), The Wedding Date (2005), Zodiac (2007), August: Osage County (2013), Insidious: Chapter 3 (2015), and the HBO films The Last Outlaw (1993) and Long Gone (1987). Mulroney played the main antagonist Francis Gibson in NBC's Crisis (2014), Dr. Walter Wallace in Pure Genius (2016–2017), Sean Pierce in Showtime's Shameless (2015–2017) and Bobby Sheridan in USA's The Purge (2018–2019).
Derek Mahon was an Irish poet. He was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland but lived in a number of cities around the world. At his death it was noted that his, "influence in the Irish poetry community, literary world and society at large, and his legacy, is immense". President of Ireland Michael D Higgins said of Mahon; "he shared with his northern peers the capacity to link the classical and the contemporary but he brought also an edge that was unsparing of cruelty and wickedness."
Ciaran Gerard Carson was a Northern Ireland-born poet and novelist.
The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature was created in 1976 by the Irish American businessman Dan Rooney, owner and chairman of the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers franchise and former US Ambassador to Ireland. The prize is awarded to Irish writers aged under 40 who are published in Irish or English. Although often associated with individual books, it is intended to reward a body of work. Originally worth £750, the current value of the prize is €10,000.
Declan Kiberd is an Irish writer and scholar with an interest in modern Irish literature, both in the English and Irish languages, which he often approaches through the lens of postcolonial theory. He is also interested in the academic study of children's literature. He serves on the advisory board of the International Review of Irish Culture and is a professor at the University of Notre Dame and at its campus in Dublin. In recent years and with publications such as After Ireland (2018), Kiberd has become a commentator on contemporary Irish social and political issues, particularly as such issues have been examined by Ireland's writers.
David Wayne Richardson was an American television writer and producer who wrote for The Simpsons, Malcolm in the Middle, Two and a Half Men, and F Is for Family. Richardson, a cancer survivor for nearly thirty years, died of heart failure in early 2021.
The Korean Tour is a men's professional golf tour run by the Korea Professional Golfers' Association (KPGA) of South Korea. In 2011, it had total prize money of about US$14 million.
Maggie O'Kane is an Irish journalist and documentary film maker. She has been most associated with The Guardian newspaper where she was a foreign correspondent who filed graphic stories from Sarajevo while it was under siege between 1992 and 1996. She also contributed to the BBC from Bosnia. She has been editorial director of GuardianFilms, the paper's film unit, since 2004. Since 2017, she has been chair of the Board of the European Press Prize.