Desmond MacNamara

Life
1918- ?; b. Dublin; moved to London in late 1950s; worked for Gate and Abbey Theatres; designed costumes for Olivier's film version of Henry V; book reviews for New Statesman, The Tablet and Studies; has written a child's biography of Eamon de Valera as well as books on picture-framing, the use of papier-māché in sculpture and on puppetry; wrote The Book of Intrusions (1994), an imaginative and digressive novel that pokes fun at Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds.

[ top]

Works
Eamon de Valera: President of Ireland (NY: Chelsea House 1988); The Book of Intrusions (Normal: Dalkey Archive 1994).

[ top]

Criticism
Kurt Jacobsen, ‘Desmond MacNamara: An Interview’, Journalof Irish Literature, 10 (Jan. 1981), pp.61-73.

[ top]

Notes
The title of MacNamara’s novel The Book of Intrusions bears a deliberate similarity to that of the Irish medieval Book of Invasions.

[ top]