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Sebastian Barry

Biography

Sebastian Barry

Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His plays include "Boss Grady’s Boys" (1988), "The Steward of Christendom" (1995), "Our Lady of Sligo" (1998), "The Pride of Parnell Street" (2007) and "Dallas Sweetman" (2008). His novels include THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS McNULTY (1998), ANNIE DUNNE (2002), A LONG LONG WAY (2005), which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, THE SECRET SCRIPTURE (2008), which was also shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, ON CANAAN'S SIDE (2011) and THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN (2014). His poetry includes "The Water-Colourist" (1982), "Fanny Hawke Goes to the Mainland Forever" (1989) and "The Pinkening Boy" (2005). His awards include the Irish-America Fund Literary Award, The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize, the London Critics Circle Award, The Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize, and Costa Awards for Best Novel and Book of the Year. He lives in Wicklow with his family.

Sebastian Barry

Books by Sebastian Barry

by Sebastian Barry

How does one hold on to a world that no longer exists? Playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry explores this question in a poignant and exquisitely told story of innocence, loss, and reconciliation. Set in a rural section of Ireland known as Kelsha, "a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere," Annie Dunne tells the story of Annie and her cousin Sarah, aging unmarried women who live according to folkways that were already vanishing during the late 1950s when the novel takes place. Their great friendship is their most valuable possession, but Anniehunchbacked and bitter over the way the rest of her family has treated herlives in constant fear that it could be taken away. Quiet and intensely personal, Annie Dunne is both a story about and a meditation on the means by which we accommodate a world too big to understand. "Oh, what a mix of things the world is," Annie reflects, "what a flood of cream, turning and turning in the butter churn of things, but that never comes to butter."