City of Writers: The Lives and Homes of Dublin Authors

For its size, Dublin has produced more writers than any other city in the world. These range from Jonathan Swift, Charles Maturin, William Carleton and Thomas Moore to Lafcadio Hearn, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce and Maeve Binchy. And they include no fewer than four winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, W.B. Yeats, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney. A City of Writers is a guide to the homes and haunts of forty of Dublin’s foremost authors. It features a profile of each and a Recommended Reading list of their works. The book also includes suggested walks, which will enable readers to retrace the footsteps of their literary idols and the characters they created. Visiting the homes of these writers, retracing their steps, provides a rare sense of immediacy, a tangible feeling of the life they led and an insight into their work. Here, James Clarence Mangan shuffled in his oversize cloak. There, Lady Morgan established Dublin’s first notable literary salon. Sheridan le Fanu walked this square after dark. Young Bram Stoker heard his first stories on that lawn. Illustrated by leading photographer Johnny Bambury, this book marks the conclusion of Brendan Lynch’s entertaining and informative trilogy on literary Dublin. The earlier volumes were Parsons Bookshop and Prodigals and Geniuses: The Writers and Artists of Dublin’s Baggotonia.