Misplaced Pages

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. It can be read as a satirical allegory on corruption, the link between capitalism and liberal democracy exemplified in the 'entrepreneurial' activities of minor drug dealers and gangsters, and reflected in the architecture of business parks and sink estates. 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.

Critical response to his work

Described by writer Kate Atkinson as "lyrical and cruel and bold and with metaphors to die for", critics have focused on Wall's mastery of language, his gift for "linguistic compression", his "poet's gift for apposite, wry observation, dialogue and character", his "unflinching frankness" and his "laser-like ... dissection of human frailties", which is counterbalanced by "the depth of feeling that Wall invests in his work". A New Yorker review of his first novel declares "Wall, who is also a poet, writes prose so charged—at once lyrical and syncopated—that it's as if Cavafy had decided to write about a violent Irish household". In a recent review, his long poem "Job in Heathrow", anthologised in The Forward Book of Poetry 2010 but originally published in The SHOp, was described as "a chilling airport dystopia". Poet Fred Johnston suggests that Wall's poetry sets out to "list the shelves of disillusion under which a thinking man can be buried". "His apocalyptic vision of the ecological demise of our planet is suffused with humility and resignation where the global catastrophe is transformed "into a universal truth / the days are shorter / today than yesterday"", according to Borbála Faragó. For Philip Coleman "Ghost Estate is a deeply political book, but it also articulates a profound interest in and engagement with questions of aesthetics and poetics".

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".

Publications

Novels

• Ti ricordi Mattie Lantry? (Guanda, Milano – 2024) ISBN 978-8823533639
• Empty Bed Blues (New Island, Dublin – 2023) ISBN 978-1848408838
• La Ballata del Letto Vuoto (Nutrimenti, Rome – 2022) ISBN 978-88-6594-902-3
• Suzy Suzy (Head of Zeus, London – 2019, TBD) ISBN 978-1-78854-549-5
• Grace's Day (Head of Zeus, London – 2018, TBD) ISBN 978-1-78854-547-1
• This Is The Country (Sceptre, London – 2005, TBD) ISBN 0-340-82215-5
• The Map of Tenderness (Sceptre, London – 2002) ISBN 0-340-82214-7
• Minding Children (Sceptre, London – 2001) ISBN 0-340-75188-6
• Alice Falling (Sceptre, London, and WW Norton, New York – 2000) ISBN 0-340-75187-8

Poetry

• Smugglers In The Underground Hug Trade (Doire Press, Galway, Ireland – 2021) ISBN 978-1-907682-83-4
• The Yellow House (Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Ireland – 2018) ISBN 978-1-910669-87-7
• Ghost Estate (Salmon Poetry, Cliffs of Moher, Ireland – 2011) ISBN 978-1-907056-70-3
• Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me (Dedalus Press, Dublin, Ireland – 2004) ISBN 1-904556-21-3
• Mathematics And Other Poems (Collins Press, Cork, Ireland – 1997) ISBN 1-898256-26-8

Short stories collections

• No Paradiso (Brandon Books, Daingean, Ireland – 2006) ISBN 0-86322-355-9
• Hearing Voices / Seeing Thing (Doire Press, Inverin, Ireland – 2016) ISBN 978-1-907682-44-5
• The Islands (University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA – 2017) ISBN 978-0-8229-4519-2

References

1. "About The Site And Actor!". cillianmurphy.weebly.com. Retrieved 27 December 2017.
2. McEwan, Todd (25 June 2005). "Across the great divide". The Guardian. Retrieved 27 December 2017. Review of This is the Country.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
3. ^ Kenny, John (14 May 2005). "Craving the Normal" (PDF). The Irish Times. Vol. Weekend, no. 13. Retrieved 27 December 2017 – via library.nuigalway.ie. Review of This is the Country.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: postscript (link)
4. "Cork World Book Festival 2022 opens with a Conversation between Dr Heather Laird and Author Jan Carson". University College Cork. 11 August 2017. Retrieved 15 May 2022.
5. "Water and its (Dis)Contents". Retrieved 19 March 2023.
6. Wall, William (1 December 2010). "The Complexity of Others: The Istanbul Declaration of The European Writers' Conference". Irish Left Review. Retrieved 1 December 2010.
7. "Review: This Is the Country by William Wall | Books". The Guardian. London. 10 August 2005. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
8. ^ Fox, Killian (27 August 2006). "Observer review: Mothers and Sons | No Paradiso". The Guardian. London. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
9. "The Best Fiction of 2000". Los Angeles Times. 3 December 2000. Archived from the original on 2 November 2012. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
10. "Briefly Noted: Briefly Noted". The New Yorker. 7 January 2009. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
11. Erwin Hofmann / Ballydehob / Ireland. "THE SHOp a Magazine of Poetry". theshop-poetry-magazine.ie. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
12. Tonkin, Boyd (9 October 2009). "Forward Book of Poetry 2010 – Reviews, Books". The Independent. London. Retrieved 5 December 2010.
13. Johnston, Fred (2006). "Longing for Readings". The Poetry Ireland Review (85): 91–95. JSTOR 25580705.
14. "salmonpoetry.com – Ghost Estate by William Wall". www.salmonpoetry.com. Retrieved 22 April 2018.
15. "Ghost Estate reviewed in Southword 21". www.munsterlit.ie. Retrieved 22 April 2018.
16. "Wall of pain and tenderness – Interview with William Wall". The Sunday Business Post. Thomas Crosbie Media. 17 July 2002. Archived from the original on 29 September 2007. Retrieved 5 December 2010 – via tcm.ie.
17. "Disabling barriers to creativity". The Irish Times. 21 September 2010. Retrieved 5 December 2010.

External links

• Official website
• Interview (March 2010) and hear him reading from his novels at podcasts.ie
• William Wall at The Other Voice International Project
• William Wall at The Munster Literature Centre
• Mathematics & Other Poems or here at Irish Literary Revival
• Interview with William Wall at tcm.ie
• Interview by William Stabile
• William Wall's "What Slim boy, O Pyrrha" (archived)
• William Wall at Three Monkeys Online

• 1955 births
• Living people
• Alumni of University College Cork
• Writers from Cork (city)
• Irish male short story writers
• 20th-century Irish novelists
• 20th-century Irish male writers
• 21st-century Irish novelists
• 21st-century Irish male writers
• Irish male novelists
• 20th-century Irish short story writers
• 21st-century Irish short story writers
• 20th-century Irish poets
• 21st-century Irish poets