Roddy Doyle

Doyle taught English and geography for fourteen years at a community school in Kilbarrack, the north Dublin territory he renamed Barrytown, and self-published The Commitments (1987) when no one would take a novel made almost entirely of talk. The Snapper and The Van completed the trilogy; Alan Parker's film of the first taught the world its soul revue.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the 1993 Booker and became for years the prize's best-selling winner; The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) gave the abused, unsinkable Paula Spencer a voice critics doubted a man could write, until they read it.

He has stayed loyal to working-class Dublin across novels, screenplays, children's books, and the barstool dialogues of Two Pints, the ear as exact as ever.