Clare Boylan
Clare Boylan (1948-2006) was an accomplished Irish writer and journalist, born in Dublin as the youngest of three daughters. She had a notable educational background, including attendance at various convent schools and graduating from the Dublin School of Journalism. Boylan began her journalism career in 1966 and made significant contributions to publications such as the Evening Press and Young Woman magazine. She gained recognition for her writing, winning the Benson and Hedges Journalist of the Year Award in 1974.
Transitioning to fiction, Boylan published her first novel, *Holy Pictures*, in 1983, which reflects on the complexities faced by women in the patriarchal context of Irish society. Her works often explore themes of womanhood across different life stages, offering insights into the lives of adolescent, middle-aged, and elderly women. Among her notable novels are *Last Resorts* and *Black Baby*, the latter receiving critical acclaim for its rich character development. Boylan's contributions to literature were recognized with various awards, including the Ford/Sunday Independent Spirit of Life Arts Award and her membership in Aosdana. Her literary influence extended to film, with a short story adaptation nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.
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Clare Boylan
Writer
- Born: April 21, 1948
- Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
- Died: May 16, 2006
- Place of death: Dublin, Ireland
Biography
Clare Boylan was born in 1948 in Dublin, Ireland, the youngest of three daughters born to Patrick and Evelyn Selby Boylan. Her grandfather, a fifth-generation Dubliner, was purportedly the model for the character of Blazes Boylan in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Boylan was educated in various convent schools, graduated from the Dublin School of Journalism, and pursued a successful career in journalism. In 1966, she worked as a reporter for the Evening Press and in 1968 as Dublin editor of Young Woman magazine. In 1970, she married fellow journalist Alan Wilkes. Returning to the Evening Press as a feature writer from 1972 to 1978, she won the Benson and Hedges Journalist of the Year Award in 1974.
Boylan began writing short stories, and when a publisher promised to publish her collected stories if she would produce a novel, she wrote Holy Pictures in 1983, while working as Dublin editor of Image magazine. Her collection of short stories, A Nail on the Head, was published the same year.
Boylan’s novels explore the role of women in the highly patriarchal and religious Irish society, as she looks at the lives of adolescent, middle-aged, and elderly women. Holy Pictures, about growing up in 1920’s Dublin, proved to be a success not only in England and Ireland but in the United States as well. The novel revolves around fourteen-year-old Nan Cantwell’s loss of innocence, as she travels the rocky road from childhood to adulthood. Boylan’s second novel, Last Resorts, centers around middle-aged divorcee Harriet Bell, who is disillusioned with her bullying children and disappointing married lover. Black Baby, Boylan’s most critically successful novel, deals with elderly spinster Alice Boyle and her relationship with Dinah, a thirty-five-year-old black woman whom Alice believes is the child she sponsored years earlier as part of a Catholic mission. Emma Brown is based on an eighteen- page fragment written by Charlotte Brontë.
Boylan received the Ford/Sunday Independent Spirit of Life Arts Award in 1997, honoring the achievements of Irish artists, and in the same year received the Hawthornden Foundation Fellowship. In 1996, she became a member of Aosdana, an organization which honors artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland. The film Making Waves (1987), based on one of her short stories, was nominated for an Academy Award in 1988.