Celebrating Irish Writers: My Top 5 Picks

St. Patrick's Day is right around the corner. While the holiday has become a much bigger deal in America than it is in Ireland, it's still a great opportunity to highlight some favorite Irish authors.

Maeve Binchy

Right now, Binchy is hands down my favorite Irish author. She is also the most modern on my list.

I wish I would have discovered her earlier, but once I read A Week in Winter, I was hooked on her writing style. The book follows different characters as they all slowly find their way to a particular inn in the tiny Irish village of Soneybridge the same week one winter. It was such a beautifully told story of how vastly different lives cross paths. It is told in similar fashion to J. Ryan Stradal's Kitchens of the Great Midwest, though Binchy's story centers around place more so than person.

Her short story collections are marvelous too. Each so compact and complete, though I want them to go on. Garden Party and Other Stories is a great collection and good place to start when you want something light and quick.

Oscar Wilde

Wilde is witty, cheeky, and uproariously funny.

I've read The Importance of Being Ernest repeatedly and it was the one play I auditioned for in college. The Poetry Foundation calls Wilde "an artist who believed that style—in life as well as art—was of utmost importance." You can feel it in his work. I've enjoyed all I've read by him, from An Ideal Husband to the creepy The Picture of Dorian Gray.

His work was a wildly popular part of the Aesthetic Movement until his arrest. (This article in The Paris Review takes an in depth look at how prison affected Wilde's writing.) Today, his plays and works are still widely read and celebrated, despite the scandals that plagued his personal life.

W.B. Yeats

Yeats is Ireland's National Poet and a Nobel Prize Winner. Dubbed Ireland's most famous poet by the Poetry Foundation, his works are packed with Irish legends and lore. His works are what introduced me to Irish mythes and I love them to this day.

When studying Yeats in school I was completely captivated by the idea of automatic writing. While I don't share Yeat's affinity for the occult and mysticism, this idea subconscious writing is fascinating on an experimental level.

Ireland still celebrates Yeats Day on the writers birthday each June 13.

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats is a collection I still have on my shelf and a great place to start if you've never read him before.

James Joyce

I have not read the colossal Ulysses or Finnegans Wake and have only read excerpts of Dubliners. Joyce is here because, for whatever reason, I love Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. It is one of those rare books I've read more than once.

It's labeled a Künstlerroman (artists novel) that covers an artist's formative years. The modernist work follows the life of Stephen Dedalous as he works to become an independent artist. Though the work is fictional, there are definite autobiographical elements.

Joyce is still widely celebrated in Ireland. Dublin celebrates Bloomsday each June 16 - the date the novel Ulysses takes place on. (This Paris Review article goes deeper.)

Samuel Beckett

Beckett is a tough one to read and understand. Author of the two=act play Waiting for Godot and a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, her created a legacy as an author, poet, and playwright.

He seemed to feel James Joyce's shadow immensely and that let him in to new literary territory that was both highly modern and experimental. His works became stripped down and minimalist, something quite different from Joyce and his 265,000 words of Ulysses. This minimalism has a unique was of spotlighting human life and the messes we make.

Honorable Mention: Frank McCourt

Not technically an Irish writer. McCourt was born in America to Irish immigrants, returned to Ireland at age 4 and came back to New York at 19. The Irish-American teacher and author won a Pulitzer Prize for his debut memoir Angela's Ashes. Though he followed it with two more works, but his first is still his best known.

“It was, of course, a miserable childhood: The happy childhood is hardly worth your while. Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood."

The book has since been turned into a movie by the same title. Both have the most hilarious scene - made funnier knowing it's based on a true story - of Frank's first communion. After returning home from this holy sacrament, the young mad proceeds to scarf down his breakfast, which promptly sends him to the backyard where he is sick. His very upset grandmother is at a loss for what to do, since now she has “God in me backyard," so back to confession they go.

The priest absolves the young man of his "sin" and tells him a little water should take care of the yard. (Though the grandmother wonders if she should use normal water or holy water for such a task.) These moments of humor help ease the misery of McCourt's childhood. While the book is heavy, the story is a worthy one.

To view or purchase any of the books we've talked about here, visit our Bookshop.org shop.

These humble suggestions are merely the tip of the literary iceberg where Ireland is concerned. What's your favorite work by an Irish writer?

Note: This photographs have been borrowed from the pages linked to them. They do not belong to me nor the Fox and Heron Literary Society, nor do we hold the copyright to them.