Jimmy Murphy

Life
[?- ]; b. Inchicore, Dublin; apprentice house-painter at 16; began writing drama in 1986; participated in National Writers’ workshop, UCG, 1990; Brothers of the Brush (Peacock Th. 1993), Best New Play award, revived in 1994, transferring to the Olympia, and subsequently performed in Boston, New York, Glasgow and Edinburgh; Welsh translation; received Stewart Parker Memorial Prize for new writintg, 1994; wrote Peel’s Brimstone (BBC Radio 4); also The Mandarin Lime, with Gary Mitchell and A Picture of Paradise [1995], which concerns homeless people; The Muesli Belt (Abbey Th., 2000), set in Dublin pub and dealing with yuppy colonisation of working-class areas in era of the Celtic Tiger and urban renewal.

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Works
“A Picture of Paradise”, in Frank McGuinness sel. & ed., The Dazzling Dark: New Irish Plays (London: Faber & Faber 1996), pp.75-169; Afterword, 170-71; “The Muesli Belt”, in Judy Friel & Sanford Sternlicht, eds., New Plays from the Abbey Theatre, Vol. 3: 1999-2001 (Syracuse UP 2003) [q.pp.]

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