John McGahern

Raised on the Leitrim-Roscommon border by a schoolteacher mother who died young and a domineering Garda-sergeant father, McGahern trained as a primary teacher in Dublin and published his acclaimed debut, The Barracks, in 1963 while still teaching.

His second novel, The Dark (1965), was banned by Ireland's censorship board over its sexual content and implied incest, and McGahern was dismissed from his teaching job with the Catholic Church's tacit approval, a rupture that sent him into years of itinerant work in England before he returned to farm in Leitrim and write.

Amongst Women (1990), his masterpiece, follows the aging IRA veteran Michael Moran ruling his farmhouse and daughters through fear, pride, and rare unbearable tenderness, and was Booker-shortlisted to wide acclaim. McGahern kept writing spare, exact prose of rural repression until his death from cancer in 2006.