Anthony Cronin

Born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford, Anthony Cronin was the author of several books of verse including the long poems RMS Titanic, Reductionist Poem and The End of the Modern World, as well as various other collections. He paid tribute to former friends Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh, Flann O'Brien and others in his memoir of literary Dublin and London of the 1950s and '60s, Dead as Doornails (1976), and he has written two compelling biographies, No Laughing Matter: The Life and Times of Flann O'Brien (1989) and Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist (1996). Cronin has published two novels, The Life of Riley (1964) and Identity Papers (1979), and one play, The Shame of It, which was produced at the Peacock in Dublin in 1974. A former cultural and artistic adviser to Taoiseach, Charles J. Haughey, he received the Marten Toonder Award for his contribution to Irish literature in 1983 as well as an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin in 2006. Anthony Cronin was elected Saoi of Aosdána in 2003.