Brian Lynch (Irish writer)

Brian Lynch was born in Dublin in 1945 and continues to live there.

He worked as a journalist for the Evening Press and art critic for Hibernia Magazine. He was a press officer for the Irish governmentand the Department of Justice. During the 1970s, he was a spokesman for Attorney General of Ireland Declan Costello. He participated in the Sunningdale Conference in 1973.^[1]

He writes poetry, plays, fiction and art criticism. He established and edited The Holy Door, a literary journal, which published such writers as W.H. Auden, Anthony Cronin, Aidan Higgins and Patrick Kavanagh.^[2]

He established Duras Press, an independent literary publisher.^[3]

• Endsville (with Paul Durcan) (Dublin: New Writers’ Press 1967), 59pp.;
• Beds of Down (Dublin: Raven Arts 1983), 46pp.;
• Sixty-Five Poems: Paul Celan (trans., with Peter Jankowsky) (Dublin: Raven Arts 1985), 88pp.;
• No Die Cast (New Writers’ Co-op. 1969), [12]pp. [ltd. edn. 75];
• Outside the Pheasantry (Gorey: Funge Arts Centre 1976), 16pp., ill. [by Paul Funge];
• Perpetual Star (Dublin: Raven Arts 1980), 47pp.;
• Voices from the Nettle-way (Dublin: Raven Arts 1989), 60pp.;
• Poesie a Lerici (TCD: Dept. of Italian 2003), 59pp. [chapbook of reading in Lerici, Spezia];
• New and Renewed: Poems 1967-2004 (Dublin: New Island Press 2004), 120pp.;
• Pity for the Wicked, a long poem about Northern Ireland, with a preface by Conor Cruise O’Brien (Dublin [Killiney]: Duras Press 2005), 78pp.

• The Winner of Sorrow (Dublin: New Island Press 2005; American edition Dalkey Archive Press 2006), 300pp.
• The Woman Not the Name (Dublin: Duras Press 2013), 342pp.

• Crooked in the Car Seat (Dublin Theatre Festival 1979, published by the Duras Press, 2024, with a preface by Colm Tóibín and an introduction by the author);
• Days Lost Behind the Curtain (1985);
• Caught in a Free State (1983) [four part television series about German spies in Ireland, co-production between RTE and Channel 4, which won a Banff Television Festival Award for best screenplay in 1985];
• Love and Rage (1999), feature film directed by Cathal Black, starring Greta Scacchi and Daniel Craig.