When my wife and I signed the lease on our new place, we fell into a discussion with our new landlord about writing and writers; not surprisingly, he’d come to the Rumpus to check out my work, and ended up checking out the rest of the site, and so a conversation about Mike Tyson led to a conversation about many other things.

It turned out that he grew up in Ireland, and over the next fifteen minutes I learned exactly how little I knew about Irish literature in the 20th century. Brendan Behan? Never heard of him. Frank O’Connor? Um, kind of. I think. Edna O’Brien? Yes! I knew that one! Well, I’d heard the name.

Sadly, my knowledge of Irish literature seemed to stop with Flann O’Brien, and I knew of little else until Seamus Heaney came along.

So a few days later he sent me the URL for the website I’ve been linking to throughout this article: Irish Writers Online, a web-only biographical dictionary of Irish writers, and a personal project of the writer Philip Casey. Each entry, in addition to a bibliography and vital dates, contains links to in-depth, off-site resources about the writers.

Who are your favorite Irish writers?

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