![]() ![]() His fellow Irish writer Anne Enright has described Hamilton a writer who "loves the spaces between things: his characters live, not just between cultures or between languages, but between the past and the future." Hamilton's 2014 novel, Every Single Minute is a fictional account of a journey to Berlin which the author undertook with his fellow writer and memoirist, Nuala O Faolain, who was dying of cancer. In May 2007, German publisher Luchterhand published Die redselige Insel (The Island of Talking), in which Hamilton retraced the journey Heinrich Böll made in Ireland that was to be the basis of his best-selling book Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) in 1957. The story is picked up in the 2006 volume, The Sailor in the Wardrobe. sentimental nostalgia and victim claims",wrote Hermione Lee in The Guardian "The cumulative effect is to elevate an act of scrupulous remembering into a work of art," commented James Lasdun in The New York Times. Telling the story through the eyes of his childhood self, it evoked the struggle to make sense of a bizarre 'language war' in which the child perceives going out onto the English speaking street outside as a daily migration. Following a year spent in Berlin on a DAAD cultural scholarship, he completed his memoir of childhood, The Speckled People (2003), which went on to achieve widespread international acclaim. His first three novels were set in Central Europe. Hamilton became a journalist, and then a writer of short stories and novels. As a consequence of this, he grew up with three languages – English, Irish and German – and a sense of never really belonging to any: "There were no other children like me, no ethnic groups that I could attach myself to". Even as a child I spoke to the walls in English and secretly rehearsed dialogue I heard outside," he wrote later. "The prohibition against English made me see that language as a challenge. His father was a strict nationalist who insisted that his children should speak only German or Irish, but not English, a prohibition the young Hugo resisted inwardly. Hamilton's mother was a German Roman Catholic who travelled to Ireland in 1949 on a pilgrimage, married an Irishman, and settled in the country. ![]() Hamilton has written plays, short stories, novels and memoirs. Hamilton was born and raised in Dublin with an Irish father and a German mother. Hamilton (born Johannes Ó hUrmoltaigh, 28 January 1953) is an Irish writer. Novel “The Pages”(Knopf 2022), Memoir “The Speckled people” ![]()
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