Brian Friel

Brian Friel was born in Northern Ireland in 1929, the son of a primary school principal and a postmistress. Friel’s grandparents were illiterate Irish speakers and would serve as inspiration for the tension between rural and progressive Ireland throughout Friel’s work. After an unhappy stint at the National Seminary, Friel attended a teacher’s college in Belfast and taught for ten years. He transitioned to writing full time after publishing multiple short stories in The New Yorker. Friel was propelled to international success following the 1964 transfer of his play Philadelphia, Here I Come! to Broadway. A Northern Irish Catholic Nationalist, Friel participated in an Irish civil rights march in 1972 during which British soldiers infamously short and killed fourteen civilians; the event became known as Bloody Sunday. Apart from The Freedom of the City, however, Friel largely avoided direct reference to politics in his work, choosing instead to focus on a broader sense of isolation and disenfranchisement. In 1980 Friel co-founded the Field Day Theatre Company in Northern Ireland, with Translations being the group’s first production. Now considered one of the greatest playwrights and short story writers of all time, Friel earned multiple Tony, Olivier, and Drama Desk nominations and awards during his career, which spanned more than half a century. Friel was intensely private and rarely offered the public glimpses into his private life. He married Anne Morrison in 1954 and had five children—four daughters and one son. Friel died in 2015 in County Donegal at the age of 86.