Collected Plays

Although Dermot Healy (1947-2014) is probably best known as a novelist and poet, he was also a prolific playwright, screenwriter, and actor. Healy’s interest in drama was long-standing, and was central to his development as a writer. Between 1985 and 2010 he wrote thirteen stage plays, all of which are gathered here for the first time. Although the settings of Healy’s plays are often local and regional by design, their energy and vision transcend those boundaries. In this respect, the publication of The Collected Plays will be of interest to all scholars and practitioners of contemporary drama.

Dermot Healy (1947-2014) grew up in Cavan near the border with Northern Ireland. Following stints in London and Belfast, Healy settled in Ballyconnell, Co. Sligo, where he founded and edited the journal Force 10. His debut collection, Banished Misfortune and Other Stories (1982), was followed by four novels and an acclaimed memoir, The Bend for Home (1996). Healy also wrote five collections of poetry and thirteen stage plays (his Collected Plays will be published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2016). Elected to Aosdána in 1986, he was the recipient of two Hennessy Literary Awards, the Tom-Gallon Award, the Encore Award, and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award.

Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies at Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-Modernist (revised edition 2009), general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–7), and co-editor (with Neil Murphy and Ondřej Pilny) of a special “Neglected Irish Fiction” issue of Litteraria Pragensia (2013). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement and is currently completing a book on the writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan.

Neil Murphy teaches contemporary literature at NTU, Singapore. He is the author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt (2004) and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (2010) and of the revised edition of Higgins’s Balcony of Europe (2010). He co-edited (with Keith Hopper) a special Flann O’Brien centenary issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction (2011) and The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He has published numerous articles and book chapters on contemporary fiction, Irish writing, and theories of reading, and is currently completing a book on John Banville.