Thomas Kilroy

‘I think a good adaptation should send you back to the original.’ — Thomas Kilroy

‘Kilroy has challenged his audiences by confronting them with subject matter often perceived disturbing, controversial, even taboo with an Irish context, including homophobia, misogyny, marital unhappiness, mental illness, nationalist extremism and religious fanaticism.’

— from The Theatre of Thomas Kilroy, José Lanters

Thomas Kilroy was born in 1934 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.

The Gallery Press is publishing all his plays: The Death and Resurrection of Mr Roche, Double Cross (a new version, 2018), 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 (Two Plays: Six Characters in Search of an Author and Henry IV), Christ Deliver Us! (2010) and Blake (2015).

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).

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

Thomas Kilroy died on 7 December 2023.

Blake

CATHERINE My Will has visions. That is all. He doesn’t live in the world as other men do.

Blake is a fictionalized account of the visionary poet’s incarceration in a 19th-century London asylum. Both enthralling and transporting, Blake meditates on the ties and tensions of a marriage and its parties’ strategies for escape to freedom.

€11.95 pb
€18.50 hb