Desmond Hogan - Biography

Biography

Hogan was born in Ballinasloe in east County Galway. His father was a draper. Educated locally at St. Grellan's Boys' National School and St. Joseph's College, Garbally Park, some of his earliest work was published in The Fountain, the Garbally college annual.

After leaving school, Hogan travelled to France, ending up in Paris just after the student riots of 1968. He later studied at University College Dublin (UCD), where he received a BA in 1972 and an MA in 1973.

In 1971 he won the Hennessy Award. The Irish Writers' Co-operative, formed by writer Fred Johnston, Neil Jordan and playwright Peter Sheridan at a meeting in a Dublin restaurant, were to publish Hogan's 'The Ikon Maker', which was also the Co-op's first publication. While in Dublin, he worked as a street actor and had a number of plays - A Short Walk to the Sea, Sanctified Distances, and The Squat - produced in the Abbey Theatre and the Project Arts Centre. RTÉ and BBC Radio broadcast some of his plays, including Jimmy. He also published stories in small magazines like Adam and the Transatlantic Review.

Later he moved to London, living in Tooting, Catford and Hounslow and then later as a lodger in the Hampstead home of Anthony Farrell, a young Irish publisher. Friends and acquaintances from this period included: writer Jaci Stephen, biographer Patrick Newley, Kazuo Ishiguro and his partner, Lorna. Hogan also participated in poetry and literature readings held at Bernard Stone's Turrett Bookshop on Floral Street in Covent Garden.

His debut novel, The Ikon-Maker, was written in 1974 and published in 1976. It deals with a mother's unwilling recognition of her son's homosexuality.

In 1977, he was the recipient of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, though this event remained undiscovered in America for several years until the Pittsburgh Press reported the revelation to its readers in 1981. In 1978, he participated in the Santa Cruz Writers Conference. In the early 1980s, Hogan was represented by the Deborah Rogers agency, which also had Peter Carey, Bruce Chatwin, Ian McEwan and Salman Rushdie on its books. In 1980, he won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for his Diamonds at the Bottom of the Sea collection of short stories. In 1981, he appeared in Granta.

In 1989, Hogan left London and was a Hudson Strode Fellow at the University of Alabama. In 1991, Hogan was awarded a place on the DAAD (German Academic Exchange) Berlin Artists' Programme fellowship which enabled him to live in that city. It was in Berlin that he fell in love with Sammy who has since died, with Hogan moving ion to Prague, griefstricken, where he wrote his book Farewell to Prague.

Hogan returned to Ireland in 1995, living in Clifden, County Galway. For a period, he lived in an old caravan in County Limerick along North Kerry/West Limerick border. In 1997, he lectured in short fiction at the University of California, San Diego.

He was a judge in the 2005 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, worth €50,000.

In July 2008, Hogan admitted a charge of aggravated sexual assault against a 15 year-old boy in Hogan's home in Ballybunion. In October 2009, Hogan was given a two year suspended jail sentence, placed on the sex offenders register and ordered not to have unsupervised contact with children under 18. Though he was defended by publisher Anthony Farrell and writer Colm Tóibín, at least one shop in the Kerry area removed his books from its shelves.

Interested in history, painting, traveller culture, he has used a typewriter since he was a child and finds the modern transition to computers difficult. Suspicious of the telephone, he prefers to communicate using postcards.