High Ground: and Other Stories

Description

The stories in High Ground are set in ordinary places: in the streets and suburbs and dancehalls of Dublin, the small towns and fields of the midlands, and the big houses of the beleaguered Anglo-Irish in the aftermath of their ascendancy. As a whole, the collection paints a portrait of the entire changing country propelled in a generation from the nineteenth into the late twentieth century.

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and brought up in the Republic of Ireland. He trained to be a primary school teacher before becoming a full-time writer, and later taught and travelled extensively. He is the author of six highly acclaimed novels and four collections of short stories. He was the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Society of Authors Travelling Scholarship, the American-Irish Award, the Prix Etrangere Ecureuil and the Chevalier de I'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Amongst Women, which won both the GPA and the Irish Times Award, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and made into a four-part BBC television series. His work appeared in numerous anthologies and has been translated into many languages. In 2005, his autobiography, Memoir, won the South Bank Literature Award. John McGahern died in 2006.