Ivy Bannister


Life
1951- ; b. 11 July, New York; B.A. Smith College; completed a PhD. at TCD; m. and settled in Dublin; author of RTÉ Radio plays and rehearsed readings of others at Peacock and Project theatres; winner of drama awards incl. O.Z. Whitehead Play (1986), Listowel Fest. Best Play (1987), Mobil Ireland Play Award (1993), and the P. J. O’Connor Literary Award; wrote The Wilde Circus Show (1990), a play about the early family life of Oscar Wilde’s [or Wilde’s family]; also The Rebel Countess, using two actresses in the title-role of Countess Markievicz; held Arts Council Bursary in 1994;
 
winner of Hennessy Short Story Prize, 1988, also Irish Times/Mills & Boon, Image/Maxwell House awards; issued Magician and Other Stories (1996), a first collection, containing children’s stories; winner of also the Francis MacManus Radio Story Prize, 1999; her story “What Big Teeth” was filmed as Forgetting Aphrodite (2004); winner of Listowel Poetry Award, 2005; issued Blunt Trauma: After the Fall of Flight 111 (2005), an autobiographical account of the mourning of her sister, an air-hostess lost in an American plane-crash with 228 others; she has contributed more than 50 pieces to “Sunday Miscellany” (RTÉ); lives in Dublin with husband, with whom two sons. DIL
 
 

[ top ]

Works
Plays (selected)
  • ‘The Wilde Circus Show’ [The Journal of Irish Literature [Delaware, Proscenium Press], 19 (Sept. 1990).
  • The Rebel Countess [unpublished].
Children’s Fiction
  • Magician and Other Stories (Dublin: Poolbeg 1996), 157pp.
Autobiography
  • Blunt Trauma: After the Fall of Flight 111 (Dublin: Ashfield Press 2005), 248pp.
Poetry
  • Vinegar and Spit (Astrolable Press 2009), 58pp. [incls. “When A Man Sees What He Shouldn’t”.
 

See also contrib. to Caitriona Moloney & Helen Thompson, eds., Irish Women Writers Speak Out: Voices from the Field, with a foreword by Ann Owen Weekes (Syracuse UP 2003), q.pp.

[ top ]

Criticism
‘Family Matters’, interview-article in Books Ireland (Oct. 2005), pp.221-22 [speaks of troubled home-life with a mentally-ill mother].

[ top ]