{"id":269,"date":"2014-06-10T17:44:24","date_gmt":"2014-06-10T17:44:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/?p=269"},"modified":"2017-05-24T17:23:38","modified_gmt":"2017-05-24T17:23:38","slug":"doyle-roddy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scholarblogs.emory.edu\/postcolonialstudies\/2014\/06\/10\/doyle-roddy\/","title":{"rendered":"Doyle, Roddy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Biography<\/h3>\n
\"doyleroddy33\"<\/a>
Image by Jon Kay\/CC Licensed<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Roddy Doyle was born in 1958 in Dublin, Ireland.\u00a0 He attended St. Fintan\u2019s Christian Brothers School in Sutton and\u00a0later continued his education at University College, Dublin. For fourteen years he worked as an English and Geography teacher at Greendale Community School, in Kilbarrack, North Dublin. Since 1993 he has been dedicated to writing full-time. In\u00a02009, he established a Dublin writing center, modeled off of San Francisco\u2019s 826 Valencia Project, called \u201cFighting Words.” This center focuses on inspiring and nurturing children\u2019s creative writing talents. He is married to Belinda and has two sons, Rory and Jack.<\/p>\n

\u201cRoddy Doyle achieved widespread recognition when his novel\u00a0The Commitments\u00a0<\/em>(1987) was made into a motion picture in 1991. Doyle\u2019s novel\u00a0Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha<\/em>\u00a0won the Booker Prize,<\/a> Britain\u2019s highest literary award in 1993. This novel established Doyle as a leading comic writer, earning comparisons to Irish humorists such as Sean O\u2019Casey and Brendan Behan\u201d (Encarta). Roddy Doyle is known as intensely private individual. His outlook on writing is, \u201cIf writers want to write, they want to write, and they should be left alone, I am no mentor and I don\u2019t think I\u2019d be doing anyone any favours if I said, \u2013 come on, lets do it this way \u2013 we\u2019ll leave the cloning to the sheep\u201d (Cullen).He has expressed an interest in protecting his privacy and has stated a preference for the quiet family life.\u00a0 He hopes that his celebrity will not alienate him from his relationship with the North Dublin suburbs that have provided the inspiration for his body of work (Cullen).<\/p>\n

Themes<\/h3>\n

\u201cDoyle\u2019s early novels rely very heavily on pure scene, in which dialogue rather than inner thoughts dominates\u201d (Keen). His novels are rowdy and rooted in working-class experience. The\u00a0first three, known as the Barrytown trilogy, focused on the Rabbittes, a family of eight whose lives are a mixture of \u201chigh comedy, depressing poverty and domestic chaos\u201d (Turbide).\u00a0 As Keen notes, \u201cThe Booker Prize-winning novel\u00a0Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha<\/em>\u00a0explores with remarkable subtlety the development of a small boy\u2019s interiority and empathy, as he simultaneously masters language<\/a> and discovers a new understanding of pain. \u201cThe novel is the most commercially successful Booker winner to date and is now available in nineteen languages. Any translator would have a daunting job with Doyle\u2019s work, though. Written almost entirely in dialogue, his books are full of \u201chilarious slang, colloquialisms, vulgarisms and cursing that is so vibrant and charged that it is almost musical\u201d (Turbide). In the past, Doyle\u2019s raw portrayal of working-class Ireland has received as much censure as praise in his native country. \u201cI\u2019ve been criticized for the bad language in my books \u2013 that I\u2019ve given a bad image of the country,\u201d said Doyle. \u201cThere\u2019s always a subtle pressure to present a good image, and it\u2019s always somebody else\u2019s definition of what is good\u201d (Turbide).\u00a0The author\u2019s own view is that his job is simply to describe things and people as they really are.\u00a0 In Doyle\u2019s world, the lives are tough,and the language is rough, but beauty and tenderness survive amid the bleakness (see also related Irish topics such as\u00a0Brian Friel<\/a>, Yeats and Postcolonialism<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Selected Author Publications and Movie Credits<\/h3>\n