25 Facts About Liam O'Flaherty

Liam O'Flaherty was an Irish novelist and short-story writer, and one of the foremost socialist writers in the first part of the 20th century, writing about the common people's experience and from their perspective.

Liam O'Flaherty served on the Western Front as a soldier in the British army's Irish Guards regiment from 1916 and was badly injured in 1917.

Liam O'Flaherty was born, a son of Maidhc O Flaithearta and Maggie Ganley, at Gort na gCapall, Inishmore.

Liam O'Flaherty instilled in them a strong sense of separatist patriotism and probably added to the radicalism which they took from their father.

Liam O'Flaherty was an uncle of Gaelic Athletic Association commentator, journalist and writer, Breandan O hEithir.

Liam O'Flaherty studied for a term in Holy Cross College, Clonliffe College.

Liam O'Flaherty enrolled for classics and philosophy at University College Dublin, where he attempted to form a Volunteer unit.

Liam O'Flaherty found trench life devastating and was badly injured in September 1917 during the Battle of Langemarck, near Ypres in West Flanders.

Liam O'Flaherty joined the Industrial Workers of the World in Canada and while in New York joined the Communist Party USA, of which his brother Tom was a leading member.

In 1923, at the age of 27, Liam O'Flaherty published his first short story, The Sniper and his first novel, Thy Neighbour's Wife.

Back in Dublin in 1924, Liam O'Flaherty co-founded the Radical Club, among whose members were many progressive artists, including Harry Kernoff, and his life-long friend and leading Irish language writer, the socialist and fellow Galway man, Padraic O Conaire, and was involved with the publication of the literary magazine To-Morrow.

In 1925 Liam O'Flaherty scored immediate success with his best-selling novel The Informer, which won him the 1925 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

Liam O'Flaherty had a second daughter with the sister of Rose Cohen, British communist Nellie Cohen, named Joyce Rathbone.

Liam O'Flaherty would have come across this in the Lahr circle, but progressive writers in Ireland were very familiar with it.

The atmosphere in 1920s Ireland, leading to the setting up of the Censorship of Publications Board and their banning of many works of literature, including Liam O'Flaherty's, inspired the political satire A Tourist's Guide To Ireland, published in 1929.

Liam O'Flaherty left Ireland again for London in early 1930 and from there travelled to the USSR on a Soviet ship on 23 April 1930.

Russian was the first language into which Liam O'Flaherty's work was translated, and during the 1920s, he was the most widely translated Irish author in the Soviet Union.

Liam O'Flaherty spent the best part of a year in the United States, from late April 1934 to June 1935, mostly in Hollywood.

Liam O'Flaherty worked with the French director Jeff Musso in the making of other films based on his novels Mr Gilhooly and The Puritan.

Some stories in Duil are similar to the short stories Liam O'Flaherty previously published in English.

Liam O'Flaherty commented "That news disgusted me; but it disgusted Padraic even more".

The play Liam O'Flaherty wrote, "undaunted" by this reception, and which he gave to Gearoid O Lochlainn, was Dorchadas, possibly the only expressionist play to be written in Irish.

Liam O'Flaherty writes that it was "packed, which rarely happens for these Gaelic plays" and that it was packed with detectives.

Liam O'Flaherty died on 7 September 1984, aged 88, in Dublin.

Liam O'Flaherty's ashes were scattered on the cliffs of his native Inis Mor.