James Joyce

James Augustine Aloysius Joyce
2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and literary critic. He is considered the most prominent English-speaking literary figure of the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1882 in Dublin to a middle-class family,  he was the eldest of what his father estimated as “sixteen or seventeen children,” only ten of whom survived infancy. He attended University College Dublin, and in 1902, he left and moved to Paris, initially to study medicine, but gave that up to write. 

He believed he could not function as an artist in Ireland then, so he moved to Italy in 1904 with a Galway woman, Nora Barnacle. She would remain his companion and inspiration for the rest of his life.

In 1914, Joyce began writing his best-known work, Ulysses. It maps the Dublin wanderings of Leopold Bloom in a single day—June 16, 1904, famous for its modernist, stream-of-consciousness style. Another well-known work is the short story collection Dubliners (1914). I share this excerpt on the video because this writing is some of the most beautiful I have ever read. He also wrote other novels - Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) and Finnegans Wake (1939). 

Joyce, renowned for his vivid portrayals of Dublin, was interviewed by Mrs Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, a suffragette, Irish nationalist, and friend of Joyce.

“Mr Joyce, you pretend to be a cosmopolitan, but how is it that all your thoughts are about Dublin, and almost everything that you have written deals with it and its inhabitants.”

“Mrs Skeffington,” he replied, with a rather whimsical smile, “there was an English queen who said that when she died, the word ‘Calais’ would be written on her heart. 'Dublin' will be found on mine.”

Joyce's Dublin and its streets and landmarks are forever etched into the pages of literary history. 

Sources: James Joyce A Life by Edna O'Brien and Wikipedia excerpts.

Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge | Irish Writers

For such a small island, Ireland has produced some of the finest writers in the world. Playwrights, poets, short story writers and four Nobel Prize winners, to name but a few, it is an extraordinary heritage. This series is designed to deepen your connection to Ireland, the country's heart and soul, and its people's rich literary heritage. As Yeats pointed out, we need to know the writers, the poets and the playwrights of that landscape and country to come to know Ireland in our own body and soul.