FRANK O´CONNOR (1947)

Playwright, novelist and short-story writer who as a critic and as a translator of Gaelic works from the 9th to the 20th century has served as an interpreter of Iris life and literature to the English-speaking world.

Raised in poverty, a childhood he recounted in An Only Child (1961) he received little formal education before going to work as a librarian in Cork and later in Dublin.

As a young man he was briefly imprisoned for his activities with the Irish Republican Army.

O´Connor served as a director of the Abbey Theatre Dublin in the 1930s collaborating on many of its productions.

During World War II he was a broadcaster for the British Ministry of Information in London.

Popular in the United States for his short stories which appeared in The New York magazine from 1945 to 1961 he was a visiting professor at several U.S. universities in the 1950s.

Notable among his numerous volumes of short stories in which he effectively makes use of apparently trivial incidents to lluminate Irish life are Guests of the Nation (1931) and Crab Apple Jelly (1944). Other collections of tales were published in 1953, 1954 and 1956. He also wrote critical studies of Turgenev and of Michael Collins and his role in the Irish Revolution.

O´Connor´s Gaelic translations include the 17th-century satire by Brian Merriman, The Midnight Court which has been considered by many to be the finest single poem written in Irish. It was included in O´Connor´s later collections of translations Kings, Lords, and Commons (1959).