William Wall (writer) facts for kids

William "Bill" Wall (born 6 July 1955) is an Irish novelist, poet and short story writer.

Early life and education

Wall was born in Cork city in 1955, but he was raised in the coastal village of Whitegate. He received his secondary education at the Christian Brothers School in Midleton. He progressed to University College Cork where he graduated in Philosophy and English.

Career

William Wall is the author of seven novels, five collections of poetry and three volumes of short stories. For many years he taught English at Presentation Brothers College, Cork, where he inspired Cillian Murphy to enter acting.

In 1997, Wall won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. He published his first collection of poetry in that year. His first novel, Alice Falling, a dark study of power and abuse in modern-day Ireland, appeared in 2000.

In 2005, This Is The Country appeared. A broad attack on politics in "Celtic Tiger" Ireland, as well as a rite of passage novel, it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. ..... This political writing takes the form of "an insightful and robust social conscience", in the words of academic John Kenny. Dr Kenny also focused on what he saw as Wall's "baneful take on the Irish family, his fundamentally anti-idyllic mood" which has "not entirely endeared Wall to the more misty-eyed among his readers at home or abroad". The political is also in evidence in his second collection of poetry Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me. He is not a member of Aosdána, the Irish organisation for writers and artists. In 2006, his first collection of short fiction, No Paradiso, appeared. In 2017, he became the first European to win the Drue Heinz Literature Prize.

In 2022 he published his seventh novel. It appeared in Italian translation first as La Ballata Del Letto Vuoto, with the English original “Empty Bed Blues” published in 2023. He has described the Italian debut as 'an experiment that so far has gone well'. His next novel was also published first in Italian in May 2024 as “Ti ricordi Mattie Lantry?”.

His provocative political blog, The Ice Moon, has increasingly featured harsh criticism of the Irish government over their handling of the economy, as well as reviews of mainly left-wing books and movies. He writes for literary journals such as Studi Irlandesi. His work has been translated into several languages.

He was one of the Irish delegates at the European Writers Conference in Istanbul in 2010.

Personal life

Wall is a longtime sufferer from Still's disease and described his efforts to circumvent the disabling effects of the disease using speech-to-text applications as "a battle between me and the software".