Life
1965-2017; successful British-born Irish stand-up comedian; b. in London; moved to Ireland at six, living with his grandmother; ed. Colaiste Eanna in Ballyroan; where he learnt comedy as a defense against teasing; won the Perrier Comedy Aware with A One Night Stand with Sean Hughes" won the Perrier Comedy Award in 1990, presented his one-man show Alibis for Life at Edinburgh Festival, 1997; team captain on Never Mind the Buzzcocks, with Phil Juptus and Mark Lamarr, 1996-2022; played the lead in film-adaption of Spike Milligan’s Puckoon and Mr Perks in The Railway Children (King’s Cross Th., March 2015); wrote a novel, The Detainees (1997), a black comedy concerning the lasting effects of childhood bullying, followed by It’s What He Would Have Wanted (1999) in which the central character finds his father hanging from a light-fitting and sets out to find the reason why; d. of cardiac arrest and cirrhosis of the liver.
[There is an autograph Sean Hughes website - still available online at 24.08.2023.]
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Works
Fiction, The Detainees (NY: Simon & Schuster 1997), 330pp.; It’s What He Would Have Wanted (Scribner 1999), 298pp. Poetry, My Struggle to be Decent and Poems of Sadness and Light (London: Bliss in Abyss Press 2013), 56pp. [54 poems].
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Criticism
‘The write sort of laughter’, interview article with Brian Boyd, Irish Times, ‘Weekend’ (23 Aug. 1997), p.15; interview article with Caroline Rees, on the death of his father and his new show The Life Becomes Noises, in The Guardian (15 Sept. 2017) - available online [accessed 24.08.2023].
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Commentary
John Dunne: review of The Detainees, ‘It will propel Sean Hughes into the front ranks of contemporary fiction writers.’ (Books Ireland, Oct. 1997, p.253.)
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