Peter Murphy


Life
?1976- ; brought up in Enniscorthy, son of post-office worker; his mother banned television in the house, to his profit; read widely but did not go to university; spent eight years as a drummer in bands; m. young, with daughters, and sep. 2008; volunteered wrote reviews for Hot Press and ultimately became a senior staff-writer; also contrib. to Rolling Stone, Music Week, and Sunday Business Post; commenced writing fiction, incl. an autobiography which he ‘never bother to read’;
 
secured lit. agent Marianne Gunne-O’Connor; suffered death of his father, 2000; formed writers’ group with two others, Sean Murray and Nadine O'Regan; returned to Enniscorthy; works with Hot Press; wrote liner notes for remastered edition of the Anthology of American Folk Music; appears regularly on RTÉ TV, arts programme The View; issued John the Revelator (2009), a novel of growing-up in an Irish country town, to great acclaim.

 

Works
Fiction, John the Revelator (London: Faber 2009), 272pp. Journalism incl. review of Craig Thompson, Habibi [graphic novel], in The Irish Times (1 Oct. 2011), Weekend, p.10 [available online].

 

Criticism
[Shirley Kelly,] ‘Getting Up at Five to Write’ [ interview article], in Books Ireland (March 2009), p.37; Cathy Unsworth, review of Nick the Revelator by Peter Murphy, in The Guardian (7 March 2009) [infra].

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Commentary
Cathy Unsworth, review of Nick the Revelator by Peter Murphy, in The Guardian (7 March 2009), ‘[...] An Irish music writer, Peter Murphy casts his debut novel like a blues noir, steeped in the music that has clearly inspired him. From the title, Blind Willie Johnson’s 1930 gospel call and response, he follows the path of Nick Cave’s 1985 Delta descent The Firstborn is Dead, with its shades of William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Harry Crews. But this spook-filled Irish landscape, rendered with gouts of blood-red humour, is entirely his own.’ (For full text, see RICORSO Library, “Reviews”, infra.)

 

Notes
Good views: John the Revelator was praised by Roddy Doyle (‘[...] It was like reading for the first time, almost as if I'd never read a novel before.’) Colm Tóibín called ‘an absolutely wonderful book’, ‘[s]o fresh, so original and disturbing and brave’. [see John the Revelator in www.myspace.com; accessed 12.07.2009].

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