LIFE AND WORKS:

Born from a catholic Irish family of working men. Before becoming a writer he makes many jobs among which the workman and the whitewasher. At the age of 16 he's arrested in Liverpool because he had with himself explosive for IRA - all his family has more or less tied connection with IRA, also his grandmother was found with explosive in her shopping bag - and is sent in a Borstal, reformatory, in Suffolk for 18 months, experience that he will tell in the autobiographic novel Borstal Boy, 1958. After having been released he still re-enters in the IRA and he is arrested again: he is condemned to 14 years to serve in Mountjoy Jail for having shot a policeman, but he will be released after 4 years. He lives for some time in Paris but he returns to Dublin in 1950. The play Quare Fellow, 1956, reach a large success at the Pike Theatre in Dublin but is with the representation of 1956 at the Joan Littlewood's Royal Theatre in Stratford, London that he obtains a large reputation thanks also to a series of interviews for the BBC (in which he was evidently drunk). In 1958 he publishes The hostage, 1958 - originally written in Gaelic with the title An Giall - that, with his previous work, represents the tragic topic of the condemned to death waiting for execution in an ironic way. 
He begins to publish stories and poems on the newspapers "The Irish Times" and "The Irish Press". He is an assiduous frequent visitor of Pub McDaid in Dublin, and unfortunately this love for drinking makes him often drunk and sulky during performance of his works and in television interviews. From 1963 he begins seriously to being ill of diabetes and this, with the inability of stopping to drink, will carry him to death a year later.

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