Life
1964- ; b. 24 Feb., West Belfast, son of worker in bread factor (when
he worked), with six siblings of whom one died; ed. locally, and at St.
Catharine’s College, Cambridge; a novel, Ripley Bogle (1989)
won the Hughes, Rooney, and Betty Trask Prize for literature; also the
Irish Book Award; m. Melanie Hammond [dg. of David Hammond]; issued
Manfred’s Pain (1992), a study of a man who compulsively abuses his
concentration-camp survivor wife, set in London; wrote powerfully of the
cult of guns in Belfast and other cities, Irish Review, 1991; issued
The Dispossessed (1992), a study of poverty in Thatcherite Britain,
with photographer Donovan Wylie; satirised the awarding of a Nobel Prize
to Seamus Heaney, Fortnight Review (Belfast), 1995; presented BBC
TV documentary on the post-Troubles period in N. Ireland for BBC, Spring
1995; issued City of Women (1996); sep. from Hammond; appt.writer-in-Residence
at UU (Coleraine), 1992-94; issued Eureka Street (1996),
centred on the cynical journalist Chuckie Lurgan and containing a caricature
of Seamus Heaney as a nationalist poet; settled in Paris; included in
Granta Best Novelists (2003). OCIL DIL2.
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Works
Fiction, Ripley Bogle (1989); Manfred’s Pain
(London: Picador 1992), 197pp; The Dispossessed (1992), City
of Women (London: Secker & Warburg 1996), pp.384; Eureka Street
(London: Secker & Warburg 1996), 395pp., and Do. trans.
into French by Brice Matthieussent (Editions Christian Bourgois [1997]).
Journalism, ‘Cities at War’, Irish Review [n.s.], No.10 (Spring 1991), pp.95-98; ‘The Glittering Prize’ , in Fortnight Review, 344 (Nov. 1995), pp.23-24 [on Seamus Heaney and the Nobel Prize].
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Criticism
Tess Hurson, ‘The State We’re In, ‘Patterson & Wilson’,
BBC Radio Ulster Broadcast [1992].
Gerry Smyth, The Novel and the Nation: Studies in the New Irish Fiction (London: Pluto Press 1997) [on Ripley Bogle], pp.132-34.
Richard Mills, ‘All Stories are Love Stories’, interview with Robert McLiam Wilson, in Irish Studies Review (April 1999), pp.73-77.
Ellen-Raïssa Jackson, ‘Gender, Violence and Hybridity: Reading the Postcolonial in Three Irish Novels’, in Irish Studies Review, 7, 2 (August 1999), pp.221-31.
‘La verve et l’insolence’, interview with with E. N. [sic.], in Figaro Magazine [?Aug. 1998].
Edna Longley, reviews Eureka Street (1996), in Fortnight Review (Oct 1996), p.34.
Lire (Ête 1998), pp.83-86, review article.
Ellen-Raïssa Jackson, ‘Gender, Violence and Hybridity: Reading the Postcolonial in Three Irish Novels’, in Irish Studies Review, 7, 2 (August 1999), pp.221-31.
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Notes
Adrian Rice, Signals: Anthology of Poetry and Prose [Abbey Grammar
School Arts Week, Feb. 1997] (Newry: Abbey Press 1998), contains extract.
Protestant writers: For Wilson’s remarks on Protestant writers
in review of Maurice Leitch’s Gilchrist (Fortnight Review,
Sept. 1994, p.45-46), see under Leitch, above.
Dermot Bolger, Contemporary Irish Fiction (1993), remarks that Wilson repudiates the ‘post-colonial literature’ tag (p.xii).
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)