Joseph O'Connor

The Star of the Sea author – and brother of singer Sinead – on his latest novel, a love story set in turn-of-the-century Dublin.

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Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin in 1963, to parents with a strong interest in fiction, poetry, theatre and music. As a child and young adult, he loved reading, and recalls his encounter, aged 17, with JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye and John McGahern’s collection of short stories Getting Through, as the moment he wanted to become a novelist himself.

He attended University College Dublin from 1981 to 1986, where he studied Literature and History and wrote for student publications, also working part-time as a journalist, reviewer and researcher for Magill magazine and The Sunday Tribune. Following the death of his mother in 1985 he took five months away from the university, during which he went to Nicaragua, reporting on the aftermath of the Sandinista revolution for various publications in Dublin. On his return, he completed an MA in Anglo Irish Literature, and then spent a year as a postgraduate at Oxford University before moving to London, where he lived for the remainder of the 1980s.

In 1989, his first short story Last of the Mohicans was published in the Dublin Sunday Tribune’s New Irish Writing page. A second story, Ailsa, was published some months subsequently. O’Connor then won that year’s Sunday Tribune/Hennessy First Fiction and New Irish Writer of the Year Awards, followed by the Time Out Magazine Travel Writing Prize in 1990 for an article about being arrested and briefly imprisoned in Nicaragua.

His first novel, Cowboys and Indians, was published in 1991, became a bestseller, and was nominated in the First Novel category for the Whitbread Prize. It was followed later the same year, by a collection of short stories, True Believers.

His second novel, Desperadoes, drew on his experiences in revolutionary Nicaragua and was widely acclaimed. It was followed by The Salesman, a contemporary psychological thriller, and Inishowen, a love story set in Donegal, New York and Dublin. A feature film, Ailsa, for which he wrote the script (based on his own short story) was released in 1992 and won several awards, including the San Sebastian Festival Prize.

In 1994, a commission to cover the World Cup in America resulted in The Secret World of the Irish Male, a surprise perennial bestseller in Ireland, and in 1995, he turned his hand to theatre with the stage play Red Roses and Petrol, which played in Dublin before transferring to London.

In 2002, his novel Star of the Sea – a tale of a famine ship leaving Liverpool for New York – was published, and a year later was picked up as part of the first ‘Richard and Judy Book Club’ selection. It subsequently reached number one in the British bestseller lists, and has by now been published in almost forty languages, has sold more than a million copies and has won myriad prizes including France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and the Irish Post Award for Fiction.

His subsequent novel, Redemption Falls, was nominated for the Impac Literary Award and France’s Prix Femina, while his latest novel, Ghost Light, is published in June 2010.

Joseph is married with two sons. The family lives in London and Dublin. He has also held posts as a Research Fellow at the New York Public Library and Visiting Professor of Creative Writing/Writer in Residence at Baruch College, the City University of New York, and as a popular radio broadcaster on RTE One’s ‘Drivetime’ news programme. He is currently compiling and editing The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, which is due to be published in 2011.


Ghost Light
It's Dublin 1907, a city of whispered rumours. A young actress begins an affair with a damaged older man, the leading playwright at the theatre where she works. Rebellious and flirtatious, Molly Allgood is a girl of the inner city tenements, dreaming of stardom in America. She has dozens of admirers but in the backstage of her life there is a secret. Her lover, John Synge, is a troubled genius, the son of a once prosperous landowning family, a poet of fiery language and tempestuous passions. Yet his life is hampered by convention and by the austere and God-fearing mother with whom he lives. Scarred by a childhood of loneliness and severity he has long been ill, but he loves to walk the wild places of Ireland. The affair, sternly opposed by friends and family, is turbulent, sometimes cruel, often tender. Many years later, an old woman makes her way across London on the morning after a hurricane. Christmas is coming. As she wanders past bombsites and through the city's forlorn beauty, a snowdrift of memories and lost desires seems to swirl. She has twice been married: once widowed, once divorced, but an unquenchable passion for life has kept her afloat as her dazzling career has faded. A story of love's commitment, of partings and reconciliations, of the courage involved in living on nobody else's terms, Ghost Light is a profoundly moving and ultimately uplifting novel.

Read more about Ghost Light at lovereading.co.uk