Roger Boylan

Background

Roger Boylan was born on July 20, 1951, in Florida, United States, to E. B. Boylan, an electronics engineer, and E. R. Boylan, a journalist and editor.

Education

From 1971 to 1972, Boylan attended the University of Ulster. In 1976, he received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of Edinburgh.

Career

Boylan began to write in order to make sense of life and in order to amuse himself and others. He was influenced primarily by modern British and Irish satirists of the absurd school; for example, Beckett, Amis, Flann O’Brien, and Joyce; also by Hayek, Kundera, Dostoevsky, and Kafka, of the central and eastern Europeans.

Boylan writes on subjects Irish, for a familiar context, and subjects universal, such as love, ambition, death, etc.

His novel "Killoyle" was published in 1997 by Dalkey Archive Press and has been reprinted four times. In 2003, a sequel, "The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad," was published by Grove Press, New York. German versions of both novels, translated by the award-winning German translator and author Harry Rowohlt, were critically and commercially successful. The third volume in the Killoyle trilogy, "The Maladjusted Terrorist," was published in Germany in 2006. The entire trilogy was reissued in German in 2007 by Kein & Aber, Zurich.

The Irish novels were followed by a European one, The Adorations, which deals satirically with historical and religious themes, including Nazism, the Occupation of France, and mystical visions. It was published in 2012 as an e-book in English under the Olympiad Press imprint.

Boylan's latest novel is Ohiowa Impromptu, a Killoyle-like footnoted satire set in New Ur, an imaginary university town in Ohiowa, an imaginary Midwestern state.

Achievements

• Roger Boylan is most commonly known as the contributor of short stories to periodicals, including Scrivener, Recorder, and Literary Review.
  
  Boylan is a regular contributor to Boston Review's "New Fiction Forum" and the online automotive review Autosavant. His stories and articles have appeared in many journals and reviews, including The New York Times Book Review, The Literary Review, The Economist, The Texas Observer, The Austin American-Statesman, and Scrivener.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Killoyle: An Irish Farce

    (Proving that the spirits of James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, a...)

    1997
  • The Adorations

    (The Adorations is a novel about Europe’s true holy trinit...)

    2012
  • The Great Pint-Pulling Olympiad: A Mostly Irish Farce

    (The hapless inhabitants of Killoyle, Ireland, face all ma...)

    2003
  • Run Like Blazes: A Memoir

    (The memoirs of Roger Boylan, groundbreaking Irish America...)

    2011
  • Killoyle-Box 1999
  • Killoyle - Wein und Käse 2006
  • Killoyle - Rückkehr nach Killoyle 2002

Interests

• European history, Asian history, music, painting, literature, technological history

Connections

Roger Boylan married Elizabeth Makowski, on October 19, 1990. They have a daughter, Margaret Mary.

Father:

E. B. Boylan

Mother:

E. R. Boylan

Wife:

Elizabeth Makowski

Daughter:

Margaret Mary