Frank O’Connor (1903-1966), short-story writer, critic, and translator, was born in Douglas Street, Cork. Although O’Connor left Cork as a young man, his work gives voice to his native city. The stories in his debut collection Guests of the Nation draw on his early life in Cork’s tenements, as well as his experience fighting in the Irish Civil War. Like Mary Lavin, O’Connor shaped the short-story form both in Ireland and internationally. He theorised that outsiders and marginalised figures, those at the fringes of society, provide the genre’s strongest material. O’Connor was particularly popular in America where he lived and taught for a period, and frequently contributed to the New Yorker. O’Connor died in Dublin in 1966.
