LITERATURE
Tony award-winning playwright
Frank McGuinness talks to Deirdre
Mulrooney about his literary journey
from Buncrana to Booterstown
Embracing the
unknown
T WAS not that happy an experience at
“I
secondary school, but university was a
tremendous liberation and an insight into the
pleasure of learning,” divulges an energised
Professor Frank McGuinness, coming out of his
postgraduate seminar on Dancing at Lughnasa
and Lady Windermere’s Fan for the MA in Anglo-Irish Studies.
At the same time as his seminar, just across the corridor in UCD’s
School of English & Drama, Professor Tony Roche was examining
one of McGuinness’s own plays with the other half of the class.
The paradoxical nature of a creative writer placing himself in a
supposed den of critics is not lost on McGuinness. But, then
again, for this Tony award-winning playwright, it was this very
School of English & Drama, along with UCD Dramsoc and a
fortuitous 1980 meeting with Patrick Mason that nurtured his
inner artist in the first place.
McGuinness’s was a childhood without books “in a working-
class estate” in Buncrana, “10 miles from the border, and 14
miles from Derry”, on Donegal’s Inishowen Peninsula. “I’ve
been making up for it ever since,” he jokes, gesturing around
his book-cluttered office. “The first book I read was Pride and
Prejudice — a schoolbook. I absolutely adored it. Then, quite
seriously, the second book was The Castle of Adventure by Enid
Blyton. I loved it! So I’m the bastard child of Jane Austen and
Enid Blyton!” However, the 55 year old is all right with that. “I
PAGE THIRTY UCD CONNECTIONS
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84