Thomas Kilroy

Thomas Kilroy was born in County Kilkenny and now lives in County Mayo. His novel, The Big Chapel, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Heinemann Award.

In his early career, he was play editor at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. In the 1980s, he sat on the board of Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in 1980, and was Director of its touring company. An Honorary Fellow of TCD he was winner of the 2008 Irish PEN/A T Cross Award for Literature and The Irish Times/ESB ‘Lifetime Achievement’ Award in 2004. Other awards include AIB Literary Prize, BBC Drama Prize, American-Irish Foundation Prize for Literature, Rockefeller Foundation Residency, Kyoto University Foundation Award and Prix Nikki Commendation (TV).

All his plays were published by the Gallery Press: The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, Double Cross, Ghosts (after Ibsen), My Scandalous Life, The O’Neill, The Seagull (after Chekhov), The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde, The Shape of Metal, Talbot’s Box, Tea and Sex and Shakespeare, Pirandellos, Christ Deliver Us!, and Blake.

Thomas Kilroy is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters, the Royal Society of Literature, and Aosdána.