#OTD in 1856 – Birth of playwright, critic and Nobel Prize laureate, George Bernard Shaw, in Dublin.

26/07/2023.Reading time 5 minutes.

George Bernard Shaw was a dramatist and a literary critic in addition to being a socialist spokesman. His valuable contributions to literature won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1925. While Shaw accepted the honour, he refused the money. He was a free spirit and a freethinker who advocated women’s rights and equality on […]

#OTD in 1939 – Birth of poet, Seamus Heaney, near Castledawson, Co Derry.

13/04/2023.Reading time 5 minutes.

“Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.” –Seamus Heaney Seamus Heaney published his first poetry book in 1966, Death of a Naturalist, creating vivid portraits of rural life. Later work looked at his homeland’s civil war, and he won the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature for his […]

#OTD in 1906 – Birth of playwright, Samuel Beckett, in Foxrock, Co Dublin.

13/04/2023.Reading time 5 minutes.

“We are all born mad. Some remain so.” –Samuel Beckett An Irish avant-garde novelist, playwright, theatre director, and poet, who lived in Paris for most of his adult life and wrote in both English and French. Beckett is widely regarded as among the most influential writers of the 20th century. During the 1930s and 1940s […]

#OTD in 1923 – William Butler Yeats receives Nobel Prize in Literature.

10/12/2022.Reading time 3 minutes.

Very early, in the first bloom of youth, William Butler Yeats emerged as a poet with an indisputable right to the name. The honour was conferred “for his always inspired poetry, which in a highly artistic form gives expression to the spirit of a whole nation.” ‘The Stolen Child’ (W.B. Yeats) Where dips the rocky […]