Literature

Brian Lynch

Brian Lynch was born 1945 in Dublin.

His first book, Endsville, shared with Paul Durcan and published in 1967, was followed by No Die Cast (1969), Outside the Pheasantry (1975), Perpetual Star (1980), Beds of Down (1983), Voices from the Nettleway (1986), Easter Snow: an Island off Ireland, with photographs and German translation by Peter Jankowsky (1992), Playtime, with paintings by Gene Lambert (1997), and New and Renewed – Poems 1967-2004 (2004). Paul Celan – 65 Poems translated with Peter Jankowsky was published in 1985.

A long poem about Northern Ireland was published in the 1999 Arvon-Daily Telegraph International Poetry Competition anthology The Ring of Words under the title Angry Heart Empty House; a revised version under the title Pity for the Wicked, with a preface by Conor Cruise O’Brien and a lengthy introduction by the poet, was published in 2005.

Crooked in the Car Seat was performed in the 1979 Dublin Theatre Festival and nominated for Best Play in the Harveys Theatre Awards. Caught in a Free State, a four-part TV series about German spies in Ireland during World War 2, was produced by RTÉ and Channel 4 in 1985 and won a Jacobs Award and the Banff International TV award for Best Drama. His screenplay Love and Rage, based on the man who inspired JM Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World, was filmed by Cathal Black in 1999.

In the 1970s he was art critic for Hibernia magazine and in 1994 he compiled and edited Tony O’Malley, a large-scale book about the eponymous artist, a third edition of which was amended and republished in 2005. The Visual Diaries – Fifty Years of Tony O’Malley’s Sketchbooks is the title of a 2005 exhibition and book.

His first short story won a Hennessy Award in 1985 and in 2005 he published his first novel, The Winner of Sorrow, based on the life of the poet William Cowper.

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