Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, on 23 February 1964.[3][4] He is of half-Irish and half-Turkish ancestry.[5]
O'Neill's parents moved around much in O'Neill's youth: O'Neill spent time in Mozambique as a toddler and in Turkey until the age of four, and he also lived in Iran.[4] From the age of six, O'Neill lived in the Netherlands, where he attended the Lycée français de La Haye and the British School in the Netherlands. He read law at Girton College, Cambridge, preferring it over English because "literature was too precious" and he wanted it to remain a hobby. O'Neill started off his literary career in poetry but had turned away from it by the age of 24.[4] After being called to the English Bar in 1987, he spent a year writing his first novel. O'Neill then entered full-time practice as a barrister in London, principally in the field of business law.[6] Since 1998 he has lived in New York City.[citation needed]
Career
Writing
O'Neill is the author of five novels. He is best known for Netherland, which was published in May 2008 and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was called "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell".[7] It was included in The New York Times list of the 10 Best Books of 2008.[8] Literary critic James Wood called it "one of the most remarkable postcolonial books I have ever read". In an interview with the BBC in June 2009, US President Barack Obama revealed that he was reading it, describing it as "an excellent novel."[9]
Among the books on the longlist, it was the favourite to win the Man Booker Prize.[10] However, on 9 September 2008, the Booker nominee shortlist was announced, and the novel failed to make the list.[11] The book received the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction[12] and the 2009 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.[13] It was shortlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC Award.[14]
His next novel, The Dog (2014), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction,[15] named a Notable Book of 2014 by The New York Times,[16] and shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.[17] His most recent novel, Godwin, was published in June 2024.
O'Neill is also the author of a collection of short stories, Good Trouble (2018), most of which first appeared in the New Yorker or Harper's magazine. Two of his stories have been awarded an O. Henry prize.[18][19] Others have been anthologized in:
New Irish Short Stories (ed. Joseph O'Connor) (Faber & Faber) (2011)
Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories (ed. David Marcus) (Faber & Faber) (2007)
Dislocation: Stories from a New Ireland (ed. Caroline Walsh) (Carroll & Graf) (2003)
Phoenix Irish Short Stories (ed. David Marcus) (Phoenix) (1999)
O'Neill has also written a non-fiction book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a Book of the Year for the Economist and the Irish Times.
He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.[21]
Personal life
O'Neill speaks English, French and Dutch.[4] He played club cricket in the Netherlands and the UK, and has played for many years at the Staten Island Cricket Club, much like his Netherland protagonist Hans.[22] His love of cricket continues and he is an active player (as of 2015[update]).[23] In an interview with The Paris Review in 2014 O'Neill said, explaining his interest in writing about Dubai in The Dog, "I’ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don’t really belong to a particular place."[24]
