Muiris Ó Súilleabháin

The ruins of the house in which Muiris Ó Súilleabháin grew up on the Great Blasket Island.

Muiris Ó Súilleabháin (Irish pronunciation: [ˈmˠɪɾʲɪʃ oː sˠuːlʲəˈvˠɑːnʲ], 19 February 1904 – 25 June 1950) became famous for his memoir of growing up on the Great Blasket Island off the western coast of Ireland, Fiche Bliain ag Fás (Twenty Years a'Growing), published in Irish and English in 1933. As one of the last areas of Ireland in which the old Irish language and culture had continued unchanged, the Great Blasket Island was a place of enormous interest to those seeking traditional Irish narratives. Ó Súilleabháin was persuaded to write his memoirs by George Derwent Thomson, a linguist and professor of Greek who had come to the island to hear and learn the Irish language. Thomson edited and assembled the memoir, and arranged for its translation into English with the help of Moya Llewelyn Davies.^[1]

While Fiche Bliain ag Fás was received with tremendous enthusiasm by critics, including E.M. Forster, their praise at times had a condescending tone (Forster himself described the book as a document of a surviving "Neolithic" culture). Such interest was tied up with romantic notions of the Irish primitive, and thus when Ó Súilleabháin tried to find a publisher for his second book, Fiche Bliain faoi Bhláth (Twenty Years a-Flowering), there was little interest, as this narrative necessarily departed from the romantic realm of turf fires and pipe-smoking wise-women.

Ó Súilleabháin was drowned on 25 June, 1950, while swimming off the Connemara coast.^[1]

References

1. ^ ^{a b} http://www.pgil-eirdata.org/html/pgil_datasets/authors/o/OSuilleabhain,M/life.htm

Persondata
Name	Osuilleabhain, Muiris
Alternative names
Short description	Irish writer
Date of birth	19 February 1904
Place of birth	Great Blasket Island, Ireland
Date of death	25 June 1950
Place of death