Literature Ireland

Eimar O'Duffy

29 September 1893 - 21 March 1935

Eimar Ultan O'Duffy was born in Dublin and educated at Belvedere College in Dublin, Stonyhurst College in Lancashire and at University College Dublin.

O'Duffy was a prolific writer. His The Wasted Island, published in 1919 by Martin Lester Publication in Dublin and republished in 1920 by Dodd, Mead and Company in New York City, is his best known book; it is a Roman à clef about the Easter Rising and the men who made it, with thinly-disguised and slanted portraits of the leaders. Its point-of-view protagonist, Bernard Lascelles, is based on O'Duffy, and its hero, the attractive and loveable Felim O'Dwyer, on Thomas MacDonagh.

King Goshawk and the Birds was reprinted by Dalkey Archive Press in 2017, with a new introduction by Robert Hogan.

Translated books

King Goshawk and the Birds