Career
In 1997, he won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award . He published his first collection of poetry in that year. His first novel, Alice Falling, a dark study of power and abuse in modern day Ireland, appeared in 2000. He is the author of four novels, two collections of poetry and one of short stories.
In 2005, This Is The Country appeared. A broad attack on politics in "Celtic Tiger" Ireland, as well as a rite of passage novel, it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. It can be read as a satirical allegory on corruption, the link between capitalism and liberal democracy exemplified in the ‘entrepreneurial’ activities of minor drug dealers and gangsters, and reflected in the architecture of business-parks and sink-estates. This political writing takes the form of "an insightful and robust social conscience", in the words of academic John Kenny. Dr Kenny also focused on what he saw as Wall's "baneful take on the Irish family, his fundamentally anti-idyllic mood" which has "not entirely endeared Wall to the more misty-eyed among his readers at home or abroad". The political is also in evidence in his second collection of poetry Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me. He is not a member of Aosdána, the Irish organization for writers and artists. In 2006, his first collection of short fiction, No Paradiso, appeared.
His provocative political blog, The Ice Moon, has increasingly featured harsh criticism of the Irish government over their handling of the economy, as well as reviews of mainly left-wing books and movies. A lot of his posts are satirical such as "Wall Supports Brand Ireland" or "A New Proclamation" which is a satire response to Ireland's economic crash and the EU/IMF bail-out, using the language and structure of the 1916 Proclamation of the Irish Republic, a founding document of the state. He writes for Irish Left Review, and reviews for The Irish Times and occasionally for literary journals. His work has been translated into several languages. He has also appeared on the Irish-language channel TG4, such as in the programme Cogar. He is a longtime sufferer from Still's disease and described his efforts to circumvent the disabling effects of the disease using speech-to-text applications as "a battle between me and the software".
He was one of the Irish delegates at the European Writers Conference in Istanbul in 2010.
Read more about this topic: William Wall
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