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• Liam Clancy
• Eoin Colfer
• Marita Conlon-McKenna
• Máire B. de Paor
• Maureen Dezell
• Emma Donoghue
• Randy Lee Eickhoff
• More Authors...
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2002 Irish Author Roundtable
 When March rolls around we all become a little bit Irish, but our guest authors are deeply attuned to their ancestral roots throughout the entire year. In our AuthorsOnTheWeb IRISH ROUNDTABLE Liam Clancy, Eoin Colfer, Marita Conlon-McKenna, Máire B. de Paor, Maureen Dezell, Emma Donoghue, Randy Lee Eickhoff, Andrew M. Greeley, Mary E. Lyons, Morgan Llywelyn, Regina McBride, Malachy McCourt, Jamie O'Neill, Martin Roper, and Niall Williams discuss what role their heritage has played in their writing, and their feelings on the humor, melancholy, and mysticism of the Gaelic soul.
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| Liam Clancy |
Liam Clancy was a founding member of The Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, whose records have sold millions of copies over the past forty years. He lives in County Waterford, Ireland, and continues to record and perform in concerts around the world.
Photo by Thom Hingle
Liam Clancy's Website
The Mountain of the Women
Browse Liam Clancy's books on Amazon.com.
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| Eoin Colfer |
Eoin Colfer is a best-selling author in his native Ireland, where he lives with his wife and son and works as an elementary schoolteacher. His first novel, Benny and Omar, was a #1 bestseller in the UK. This is his first American publication, and he is already at work on the next Artemis Fowl story.
Eoin Colfer's Website
Artemis Fowl
Browse Eoin Colfer's books on Amazon.com.
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| Marita Conlon-McKenna |
Marita Conlon-McKenna is one of Ireland's most popular and well-respected authors of young adult fiction. Two of her novels are on the list of "100 novels of all time by Irish authors," compiled by Easons Irish bookseller. Her books include Under the Hawthorne Tree, Fields of Home, The Blue Horse, No Goodbye, Safe Harbour, and In Deep Dark Wood. The Magdalen, which was a number one bestseller in Ireland, is Conlon-McKenna's first adult novel and her first book to be published in the United States. Marita Conlon-McKenna lives in Ireland.
Tor Books Website
Browse Marita Conlon-McKenna's books on Amazon.com.
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| Máire B. de Paor |
Máire B. de Paor, PBVM, known to her friends and associates as Sister Declan, is a Presentation Sister and Irish religious scholar. She has degrees from University College Dublin, Maynooth, and a doctorate from University College Cork. Sister Declan has written three previous books on Gaelic Christianity and is a native of County Waterford, Ireland.
HarperCollins Website
Browse Máire B. de Paor's books on Amazon.com.
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| Maureen Dezell |
Maureen Dezell, in her own words, grew up in "different cold war Catholic youth culures in the 1960s." "Dezell" is a derivation of an Irish surname. Dezell grew up with three younger brothers and a sister and was moved frequently by her father's insurance company. Before she was sixteen, her family moved eight times in and around New York, Cleveland, southern New Jersey, and suburban Baltimore. In an area known as "Balmermerlin," her parents stopped moving.
Two years later Dezell began her undergraduate studies at Boston College where she was the first woman editor of Stylus, the campus art and literature magazine, and the first female managing editor of The Heights, the student newspaper.
Dezell also helped establish the Women's Resource Center at Boston College. In Boston, Dezell was taken aback to find that "Irish" had almost become a synonym for "racist," given the fierce reaction of Irish Americans in south Boston to the court-ordered integration of their city's public schools. Therefore, Dezell tried to distance herself from "Irishness" during her undergraduate years. She graduated in 1975.It was after college that a succession of three St. Patrick's Days prompted her to contemplate her own Irish American identity and that of the Irish American community as a whole. After graduating, Dezell taught English as a second language to international students for six years. As part of the curriculum, her students discussed their own cultures. One St. Patrick's Day her students asked her to escort them to the St. Patrick's Day parade in Boston, hoping for a window into her own Irish American culture. Dezell was horrified at the idea that the parade might be interpreted as an embodiment of her Irish American heritage, but wondered how better to articulate a culture that she couldn't even describe to herself.Years later, someone pinned a "Kiss Me I'm Irish" button on her son and she had the same frustrated reaction. The following St. Patrick's Day, Dezell put her frustrations into an article for The Boston Globe, where she is a staff writer. That article was the genesis for Irish America: Coming Into Clover. Dezell currently lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, with her husband John Shea and their son Christopher.
Maureen Dezell's Website
Anchor Books Website
Browse Maureen Dezell's books on Amazon.com.
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| Emma Donoghue |
Emma Donoghue was born in Dublin in 1969, where she lived until she was twenty. She earned her Ph.D. in eighteenth-century English fiction at Cambridge and is the author of three novels, including the bestselling Slammerkin, a critical work of seventeenth-century British culture, and a book of re-imagined fairy tales. Currently she lives in Ontario, Canada.
Photo by Kerry Kearns
Harcourt Brace Website
Browse Emma Donoghue's books on Amazon.com.
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| Randy Lee Eickhoff |
Randy Lee Eickhoff is a Ph.D. and an award-winning poet who has been published in national and international anthologies and his essays and critical writings regarding Elizabethan and Victorian works have been favorably received in academic journals. He is the author of several novels in addition to the critically acclaimed The Ulster Cycle, including The Fourth Horseman, Bowie, and The Gombeen Man.
A decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, Eickhoff is one of the only three survivors of a twenty-seven member specially trained unit of paratroopers and has received a presidential citation. Eickhoff was one of the youngest newspaper columnists in the United States and later went on to the field of education. As an English teacher, Eickhoff was also the director of a highly recognized dramatics department.
Randy Lee Eickhoff lives in El Paso, Texas with Dianne, his wife of more than thirty years.
Randy Lee Eickhoff's Website
Tor Books Website
Browse Randy Lee Eickhoff's books on Amazon.com.
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