The Barracks is set in a police barracks similar to the one McGahern lived in with his father from the age of ten, after his mother's death from breast cancer. The narrator and central character is Elizabeth Reegan, a young woman who had worked as a nurse in London for two years during the Blitz. She then marries a widower police officer with three children and lives in the Irish village where she had been raised. She is unhappy with her new life and depressed. She discovers that she is dying of breast cancer, as McGahern's mother had.[2][3]
The generous Macauley Fellowship McGahern received for The Barracks allowed him to take a year's sabbatical from his job as a teacher. During this year he travelled and lived in London, Spain, France, and Germany, finished his second novel The Dark, worked as a labourer and barman, and married Annikki Laaksi, a Finnish theatre director. The Dark was published in 1965, and caused McGahern's fame in Ireland to become notoriety when it was banned under the Censorship Act because of its themes of parental and clerical child abuse.[1]
The Barracks was adapted for the stage by Hugh Leonard for the 1969 Dublin Theatre Festival.[4]
This article contains information about the literary events and publications of 1963.
Irish literature is literature written in the Irish, Latin, English and Scots languages on the island of Ireland. The earliest recorded Irish writing dates from back in the 7th century and was produced by monks writing in both Latin and Early Irish, including religious texts, poetry and mythological tales. There is a large surviving body of Irish mythological writing, including tales such as The Táin and Mad King Sweeny.
Marsha Hunt is an American actress, novelist, singer and former model, who has lived mostly in Britain and Ireland. She achieved national fame when she appeared in London as Dionne in the long-running rock musical Hair. She enjoyed close relationships with Marc Bolan and Mick Jagger, who is the father of her only child Karis Jagger.
Hugh Leonard was an Irish dramatist, television writer, and essayist. In a career that spanned 50 years, Leonard wrote nearly 30 full-length plays, 10 one-act plays, three volumes of essay, two autobiographies, three novels, numerous screenplays and teleplays, and a regular newspaper column.
The Third Policeman is a novel by Irish writer Brian O'Nolan, writing under the pseudonym Flann O'Brien. It was written in 1939 and 1940, but after it initially failed to find a publisher, the author withdrew the manuscript from circulation and claimed he had lost it. The book remained unpublished at the time of his death in 1966. It was published by MacGibbon & Kee in 1967.
Tanith Lee was a British science fiction and fantasy writer. She wrote more than 90 novels and 300 short stories, and was the winner of multiple World Fantasy Society Derleth Awards, the World Fantasy Lifetime Achievement Award and the Bram Stoker Award for Lifetime Achievement in Horror. She also wrote a children's picture book, and many poems. She wrote two episodes of the BBC science fiction series Blake's 7. She was the first woman to win the British Fantasy Award best novel award, for her book Death's Master (1980).
Events in the year 1975 in Ireland.
John McGahern was an Irish writer and novelist. He is regarded as one of the most important writers of the latter half of the twentieth century.
Amongst Women is a novel by the Irish writer John McGahern (1934–2006). McGahern's best known novel, it is also considered his greatest work.
The Censorship of Publications Board is an independent board established by the Censorship of Publications Act, 1929 to examine books and periodicals that are for sale in the Republic of Ireland. It is governed by the Censorship of Publications Acts of 1929, 1946 and 1967. The Board has the authority to prohibit any book or periodical that they find to be obscene. This makes it illegal to buy, sell or distribute that publication in the Republic of Ireland. The Board prohibited a large number of publications in the past, including books by respected authors. However, since the 1990s it does not prohibit publications very often.
The Dark is the second novel by Irish writer John McGahern, published in 1965.
Robie Mayhew Macauley was an American editor, novelist and critic whose literary career spanned more than 50 years.
Thomas Augustine Martin was an Irish academic, Anglo-Irish scholar, teacher, writer, broadcaster and literary critic. During his career he was Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin, chairman of the Board of the Abbey Theatre, and a member of the Seanad Éireann from 1973 to 1981.
Patrick Swift (1927–1983) was an Irish painter who worked in Dublin, London and the Algarve, Portugal.
X, A Quarterly Review, often referred to as X magazine, was a British review of literature and the arts published in London which ran for seven issues between 1959 and 1962. It was co-founded and co-edited by Patrick Swift and David Wright.
Susan Langstaff Mitchell was an Irish writer and poet, known for her satirical verse.
Bridget O'Connor was a BAFTA-winning author, playwright and screenwriter.
Emma Denise Hannigan was an Irish author and blogger, best known for writing about her experience of suffering from cancer.
James Harpur is a British born Irish poet who has published eight books of poetry. He has won a number of awards, including the Michael Hartnett Award and the UK National Poetry Competition. He has also published books of non-fiction and a novel, The Pathless Country. He lives in West Cork and is a member of Aosdána, the Irish academy of the arts.
Elizabeth Irene Cullinan was an Irish–American writer who started her career as a typist at The New Yorker magazine, which published her stories from 1960 to 1981. She produced two short story collections, The Time of Adam (1971) and Yellow Roses (1977), and two novels, House of Gold (1970) and A Change of Scene (1982). Cullinan was not well-known but her modest output earned her "outsize acclaim" from her contemporaries, including Joyce Carol Oates, and comparisons to Chekhov and Joyce. Her work centred primarily on working class Irish-Americans, Catholicism and "women keen to avoid the lives their mothers had". She won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship Award and received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Carnegie Fund.
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