Jamie O'Neill

He was one of the Irish delegates at the European Writers Conference in Istanbul in 2010.

O'Neill was in a London pub when he noticed his dog was missing. Paddy had been found by a ballet dancer named Julien Joly. They began a relationship and Joly was instrumental in helping O'Neill put his life back together. During the ten years that followed, O'Neill wrote At Swim, Two Boys, which was published in 2001. The two events seemed to break the negative cycle of the author's life.

Ten years after publication, Alison Walsh, reviewing the year 2001 for the Sunday Independent, called it "a vintage one in Irish writing", specifically naming the "unforgettable" At Swim, Two Boys alongside books by Dermot Bolger, Eoin Colfer and Nuala O'Faolain.

His first novel, Disturbance, was published in 1989; Kilbrack followed in 1990. O'Neill struggled to write, parted company with both his agent and publisher, and took a job as a night porter at the Cassel Hospital, a psychiatric institution in Richmond, London from 1990 to 2000.

O'Neill stayed with him until his death in 1988. The British tabloid press, who had run multiple exposés about Harty during his fatal illness, approached O'Neill offering him money to sell his story. Though he rebuffed all these offers, the Sunday Mirror published a nude photo from his modelling days in London. Harty's family had O'Neill, who had no legal standing in the estate, removed from the presenter's house; during this difficult period he eventually became homeless.

Jamie O'Neill (born 1 January 1962) is an Irish author. His critically acclaimed novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001), earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent praise as the natural successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett. He is currently living in Gortachalla in County Galway, having previously lived and worked in England for two decades.

O'Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1962 the youngest of four children and was educated at Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin, run by the Presentation Brothers, and (in his words) "the city streets of London, the beaches of Greece." He was raised in a home without books, and first discovered that books "could be fun" when he read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, a copy of which he had received as a Christmas gift. It took him two weeks and was the first book he ever finished. O'Neill was unhappy at home; he had a very difficult relationship with his father and ran away at age 17.