Roddy Doyle

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Born in Dublin in 1958, Doyle attended a Christian Brothers school in Sutton before graduating from University College Dublin with a BA and going on to become a teacher. His first novel, The Commitments, was self-published in 1987, and sold to a British publisher in 1988, but it wasn’t until the book was made into a popular film in 1991 that he really achieved widespread recognition.

His second major novel, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha was awarded the Booker Prize in 1993 amidst reviews that acclaimed him as an outstanding comic writer, and that same year, after fourteen years teaching English and Geography at his old school, Greendale Community School in Kilbarrack, North Dublin, Doyle dedicated himself to writing full-time.

Doyle’s other books include The Barrytown Trilogy (The Commitments; The Snapper and The Van); The Woman Who Walked into Doors; A Star Called Henry; Oh, Play That Thing and Paula Spencer, plus a number of books for children including a series about a dog called Rover, featuring The Giggler Treatment; Rover Saves Christmas and The Meanwhile Adventures, plus several standalone titles such as Wilderness and Her Mother’s Face. His short stories are collected in a volume entitled The Deportees, and his drama includes Brownbread; War; Guess Who's Coming to the Dinner, and a new version of The Playboy of the Western World. He has also written a play for children entitled No Messin’ with the Monkeys!

He is however, perhaps unusually for authors of his stature – exceptionally modest when it comes to the matter of his achievements and popularity. As he noted in a recent Guardian article: "I still live in the same neighbourhood where I grew up, and I still have to face the milkman and the neighbours if they don't like what I write." He lives and works in Dublin, is married with three children, and has an Honorary Doctorate (D Phil) from Dublin City University.


The Dead Republic
At the end of Oh, Play That Thing , the second volume of Roddy Doyle's trilogy about Henry Smart, Henry, his leg severed in an accident with a railway boxcar, crawls into the Utah desert to die - only to be discovered by John Ford, who's there shooting his latest Western. Ford recognizes a fellow Irish rebel and determines to turn Henry's story - a boy volunteer at the GPO in 1916, a hitman for Michael Collins, a republican legend - into a film. He appoints him 'IRA consultant' on his new film, The Quiet Man. The Dead Republic opens in 1951. Henry is returning to Ireland for the first time since his escape in 1922. With him are the stars of Ford's film, John Wayne and Maureen O'Hara, and the famous director himself, 'Pappy', who in a series of intense, highly charged meetings has tried to suck the soul out of Henry and turn it into Hollywood gold-dust. Ten years later Henry is in Dublin, working in Ratheen as a school caretaker, nicknamed 'Hoppy Henry' by the boys on account of his wooden leg. When he is caught in a bomb blast, that wooden leg gets left behind. He finds himself a hero: the old IRA veteran who's lost his leg to a UVF bomb. Wheeled out by the Provos, Henry is to find he will have other uses too, when the peace process begins in deadly secrecy...In three brilliant novels, A Star Called Henry , Oh, Play That Thing and The Dead Republic , Roddy Doyle has told the whole history of Ireland in the twentieth century. And in the person of his hero, he has created one of the great characters of modern fiction.

Read more about The Dead Republic at Lovereading.co.uk