William Joseph Shields, known professionally as Barry Fitzgerald, was an Irish stage, film and television actor. In a career spanning almost forty years, he appeared in such notable films as Bringing Up Baby (1938), The Long Voyage Home (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), The Sea Wolf (1941), Going My Way (1944), None but the Lonely Heart (1944) and The Quiet Man (1952). For Going My Way, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and was simultaneously nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. He was the older brother of Irish actor Arthur Shields. In 2020, he was listed at number 11 on The Irish Times list of Ireland's greatest film actors.
The history of Irish theatre begins in the Middle Ages and was for a long time confined to the courts of the Gaelic and "Old English" – descendants of 12th-century Norman invaders – inhabitants of Ireland. The first theatre building in Ireland was the Werburgh Street Theatre, founded in 1637, followed by the Smock Alley Theatre in 1662.
Brendan Francis Aidan Behan was an Irish poet, short story writer, novelist, playwright, and Irish Republican, an activist who wrote in both English and Irish. He was named by the US website Irish Central as one of the greatest Irish writers of all time.
Jim Sheridan is an Irish playwright and filmmaker. Between 1989 and 1993, Sheridan directed three critically acclaimed films set in Ireland, My Left Foot (1989), The Field (1990), and In the Name of the Father (1993), and later directed the films The Boxer (1997), In America (2003), and Brothers (2009). Sheridan received six Academy Award nominations.
Jim Norton is an Irish stage, film and television character actor, known for his work in the theatre, most notably in Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, and on television as Bishop Brennan in the sitcom Father Ted.
Borstal Boy is a 1958 autobiographical book by Brendan Behan. The story depicts a young, fervently idealistic Behan, who loses his naïveté over the three years of his sentence to a juvenile borstal, softening his radical Irish republican stance and warming to his British fellow prisoners. From a technical standpoint, the novel is chiefly notable for the art with which it captures the lively dialogue of the Borstal inmates, with a variety of the many subtly distinctive accents of Britain and Ireland intact on the page. Ultimately, Behan demonstrated by his skillful dialogue that working class Irish Catholics and English Protestants actually had more in common with one another through class than they had supposed, and that alleged barriers of religion and ethnicity were merely superficial and imposed by a fearful middle class.
Desmond Hogan is an Irish writer. Awarded the 1977 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and 1980 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, his oeuvre comprises novels, plays, short stories and travel writing.
Anna Maria Manahan was an Irish stage, film and television actress.
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.
Nancy Harris is an Irish playwright and screenwriter. She was given the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2012.
John Crowley is an Irish film and theatre director. He is best known for the films Brooklyn (2015) and his debut feature, Intermission (2003), for which he won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Director. He is a brother of the designer Bob Crowley.
Mark O'Rowe is an Irish playwright and screenwriter.
Borstal Boy is a play adapted by Frank McMahon from the 1958 autobiographical novel of Irish nationalist Brendan Behan of the same title. The play debuted in 1967 at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, with Frank Grimes as the young Behan. McMahon won a New York Drama Critics' Circle Award in 1970 and Tony Award in 1970 for his adaptation.
Borstal Boy is a 2000 romantic drama film directed by Peter Sheridan, based on the 1958 autobiographical novel of the same name by Brendan Behan.
Frank McMahon was an American-Irish playwright and broadcasting executive. His adaptation of Brendan Behan's autobiographical Borstal Boy played on Broadway after a long run in Dublin's Abbey Theatre.
Ronan Sheehan is an Irish novelist, short story writer and essayist. He was an early member of the Irish Writers' Co-operative and its Secretary from 1975 to 1983. He received the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 1984. Until 2005 he was a practising lawyer in Dublin, specialising in copyright law. He was the General Editor of the Catullus Project to translate works by Catullus into English and Irish.
Gabriel Walsh, born in Dublin, is a writer, publishing books and producing scripts for TV shows and movies.
44, Dublin Made Me is an autobiographical novel written by the Irish author Peter Sheridan. It was published in 1999 by Viking in New York and Macmillan in London. The British title was 44: A Dublin Memoir. The book evokes one decade in Peter Sheridan’s life – the sixties – the time of his childhood and youth that made him the man he is today. The author picked up the number 44 for his book’s title because he had lived at 44 Seville Place. According to WorldCat, the book is held in 529 libraries. The book was reviewed in Publishers Weekly, The New York Times, and the Irish Independent, among other publications. It was also nominated for a 1999 Irish Times literature prize for best non-fiction.
Mark O'Connell is an Irish author and journalist. His debut book, To Be A Machine, was published in 2017, followed by Notes From an Apocalypse in 2020. His third book, A Thread of Violence, was published in 2023. He has written for publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Guardian. He is also the author of the Kindle Single Epic Fail: Bad Art, Viral Fame, and the History of the Worst Thing Ever, as well as an academic study of the novels of John Banville.
Owen Roe is an Irish stage, film, and television actor. He performed as a satirist on Irish radio. He is also a playwright and has worked as a theatrical director.
