Desmond Hogan

Desmond Hogan was born in Ballinasloe, County Galway, on 10 December 1950, the son of a draper. He left that small town for Paris after the 1968 riots, then Dublin, where he studied at University College Dublin and performed street acts before writing The Ikon-Maker. The novel, published in 1976, won the 1977 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and remains his most celebrated work.