John Boyne | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | 30 April 1971 Dublin, Ireland |
| Period | 2000–present |
| Genre | Literary fiction |
| Notable works | The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas The Absolutist |
| Website | |
| johnboyne | |
John Boyne (born 30 April 1971) is an Irish novelist. [1] He is the author of fourteen novels for adults, six novels for younger readers, two novellas and one collection of short stories. His novels are published in over 50 languages. His 2006 novel The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was adapted into a 2008 film of the same name.
Boyne was born in Dublin, where he still lives. His first short story was published by the Sunday Tribune and in 1993 was shortlisted for a Hennessy Literary Award. [2] [3] His B.A degree is from Trinity College Dublin in English in 1993, [4] [5] and he subsequently obtained an MA degree from the University of East Anglia. In 2015 he was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of East Anglia. He chaired the jury for the 2015 Scotiabank Giller Prize. [6]
Boyne is gay, and has spoken about the difficulties he encountered growing up gay in Catholic Ireland. [7] [8] [9] He has spoken of suffering abuse in Terenure College as a student there. [10]
He regards John Banville as "the world's greatest living writer". [11]
In August 2020, it was noticed that Boyne's latest novel, A Traveller at the Gates of Wisdom, which takes place in the real world in the year 1 AD, contained a section in which a seamstress refers to the ingredients used to create dyes. However, the listed ingredients were entirely fictional, being taken from the 2017 videogame The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , and included items such as the "silent princess" flower, "octorok eyeballs", and "the tail of the red lizalfos". The error was initially posted on Reddit, and after writer Dana Schwartz highlighted the segment on Twitter, theorizing that Boyne had done an Internet search for 'how to dye clothes red' and used the Zelda results without looking into the context, Boyne admitted his error, saying "I'll leave it as it is. I actually think it's quite funny and you're totally right. I don't remember but I must have just Googled it. Hey, sometimes you just gotta throw your hands up and say 'yup! My bad!'" [12]
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas was published in 2006. The book has sold over seven million copies worldwide. [13] A Heyday/Miramax film adaptation, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas , was shot in Budapest in mid-2007 and released in late 2008. Directed by Mark Herman, the film stars Asa Butterfield, David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, Rupert Friend and Sheila Hancock. In January 2020, the book was cited by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, in a set of back and forth tweets between the museum and the author, as a book that should be avoided by those promoting accurate understanding of the Holocaust. [14] In response, Boyne suggested that the Museum's criticism contained inaccurate information. [15]
Boyne's 2019 book My Brother's Name Is Jessica, about a young boy coming to terms with his older sibling coming out as a trans girl, was criticised over its portrayal of transgender topics and for misgendering people. In an article in The Irish Times promoting the book, Boyne explained that he was inspired to write it by a transgender friend of his, and had spoken to gender-identity professionals and "several trans people" to ensure he portrayed the book's subject matter authentically. However, he received further criticism for stating in the article that "I reject the word 'cis'... I don't consider myself a cis man; I consider myself a man." He added that "while I will happily employ any term that a person feels best defines them... I reject the notion that someone can force an unwanted term on to another". [16] [17]
Boyne deleted his Twitter account, citing social media harassment, though he would later rejoin the site. [18] [19] [15] Some writers have supported him. [20] [21] In 2020, comedian and writer Aidan Comerford, who had repeatedly accused Boyne of transphobia, issued an apology via Twitter. Comerford admitted that his tweets about Boyne "were relentless harassment" that had caused Boyne "great distress." Boyne responded by saying, "I am grateful for Aidan Comerford's apologies and retractions and, outside of that, I have no further comment." [22]
He alluded to the backlash he received over the book again in a newspaper column in 2021. Although Boyne did not mention Comerford by name, he referenced someone who "admitted that he’d been engaged in a determined campaign of 'relentless harassment'", and then "slithered back to his subterranean cavern to lick his wounds". [23]
Other Awards:
The Booker Prize, formerly the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a prestigious literary award conferred each year for the best single work of sustained fiction written in the English language, which was published in the United Kingdom and/or Ireland. The winner of the Booker Prize receives £50,000, as well as international publicity that usually leads to a significant sales boost. When the prize was created, only novels written by Commonwealth, Irish, and South African citizens were eligible to receive the prize; in 2014, eligibility was widened to any English-language novel—a change that proved controversial.
The Miles Franklin Literary Award is an annual literary prize awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases". The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin (1879–1954), who is best known for writing the Australian classic My Brilliant Career (1901). She bequeathed her estate to fund this award. As of 2016, the award is valued at A$60,000.
Niall Williams is an Irish writer.
Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet.
Adam Haslett is an American fiction writer and journalist. His debut short story collection, You Are Not a Stranger Here, and his second novel, Imagine Me Gone, were both finalists for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He has been awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the American Academy in Berlin. In 2017, he won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2006 historical novel by Irish novelist John Boyne. The plot concerns a German boy named Bruno whose father is the commandant of Auschwitz and Bruno's friendship with a Jewish detainee named Shmuel.
Oliver Brendan Jeffers is an Australian-born Northern Irish artist, illustrator and writer. He went to the integrated secondary school Hazelwood College, then graduated from the University of Ulster in 2001. He relocated back to Northern Ireland in the early 2020s after a spell living and working in Brooklyn.
Adrian McKinty is a Northern Irish writer of crime and mystery novels and young adult fiction, best known for his 2020 award-winning thriller, The Chain, and the Sean Duffy novels set in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. He is a winner of the Edgar Award, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award, the Macavity Award, the Ned Kelly Award, the Barry Award, the Audie Award, the Anthony Award and the International Thriller Writers Award. He has been shortlisted for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière.
The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas is a 2008 Holocaust historical drama film written and directed by Mark Herman. It is based on the 2006 novel of the same name by John Boyne. Set in Nazi-occupied Poland, the film follows the son of a Schutzstaffel officer who befriends a Jewish prisoner of his age.
Oneworld Publications is a British independent publishing firm founded in 1986 by Novin Doostdar and Juliet Mabey originally to publish accessible non-fiction by experts and academics for the general market. Based in London, it later added a literary fiction list and both a children's list and an upmarket crime list, and now publishes across a wide range of subjects, including history, politics, current affairs, popular science, religion, philosophy, and psychology, as well as literary fiction, crime fiction and suspense, and children's titles.
Kevin Barry is an Irish writer. He is the author of three collections of short stories and three novels. City of Bohane was the winner of the 2013 International Dublin Literary Award. Beatlebone won the 2015 Goldsmiths Prize and is one of seven books by Irish authors nominated for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award, the world's most valuable annual literary fiction prize for books published in English. His 2019 novel Night Boat to Tangier was longlisted for the 2019 Booker Prize. Barry is also an editor of Winter Papers, an arts and culture annual.
Anuradha Roy is an Indian novelist, journalist and editor. She has written five novels: An Atlas of Impossible Longing (2008), The Folded Earth (2011), Sleeping on Jupiter (2015), All the Lives We Never Lived (2018), and The Earthspinner (2021).
Damian Leighton Barr is a Scottish writer and broadcaster. He is the creator and host of the Literary Salon, which started at Shoreditch House in 2008, and he hosts live literary events worldwide. In 2014 and 2015, he presented several editions of the BBC Radio 4 cultural programme Front Row. He has hosted several television series including Shelf Isolation and most recently The Big Scottish Book Club for BBC Scotland. He is the author of the 2013 memoir Maggie & Me, about his 1980s childhood in the west of Scotland, and the 2019 novel You Will Be Safe Here, set in South Africa in 1901 and now. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (FRSA).
Donal Ryan is an Irish writer. He has published six novels and one short story collection. In 2016, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry described Ryan in The Guardian as "the king of the new wave of Irish writers". All of his novels have been number one bestsellers in Ireland.
Trent Dalton is an Australian novelist and journalist. He is best known for his 2018 semi-autobiographical novel Boy Swallows Universe.
Lost Children Archive is a 2019 novel by writer Valeria Luiselli. Luiselli was in part inspired by the ongoing American policy of separating children from their parents at the Mexican-American border. The novel is the first book Luiselli wrote in English.
Nicola Pierce is an Irish writer and ghost writer.
Girl, Woman, Other is the eighth novel by Bernardine Evaristo. Published in 2019 by Hamish Hamilton, it follows the lives of 12 characters in the United Kingdom over the course of several decades. The book was the co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize, alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments.
Caoilinn Hughes is an Irish novelist, and short story writer.
The Thing About December is a social novel written by the Irish novelist Donal Ryan. It was first published in 2013 by The Lilliput Press in Ireland. It was published in the US in 2014 by Steerforth Press. It was shortlisted for the Irish Book Award for the Novel of the Year and longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award in 2015.
As a young gay man behind a bookshop counter, I watched the people who bought At Swim, Two Boys—and there were a lot of them—and used it as a tool for flirtation.A reprint of John Boyne's introduction to At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill.
[...]not because I had any issue with being gay[...]
It's not easy to be a young, gay teenager[...]
I reject the word "cis" ... I don't consider myself a cis man; I consider myself a man.
