Jennifer Johnston

Jennifer Johnston, born in Dublin in 1930, was the daughter of Irish writer Denis Johnston and Irish actress/producer Shelah Richards, whose marriage ended in divorce during Jennifer Johnston’s childhood. She was raised Anglican and considered “Anglo-Irish,” a social/ethnic group associated with Protestantism, wealth, landownership, and (sometimes) loyalty to British colonial rule. She attended Trinity College Dublin but dropped out in 1951 upon marrying her first husband, Ian Smyth, with whom she had four children. After she and Smyth divorced, she remarried lawyer and dendrologist David Gilliland. In 1972, she published her first novel, The Captains and the Kings, which won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award. She went on to publish well over a dozen novels, including Shadows on Our Skin (1977), which made the Booker Prize shortlist, and The Old Jest (1979), which won the Whitbread Book Award (now called the Costa Book Award). In 2006, she received the Irish PEN Award, a lifetime achievement awarded annually to an Irish writer whose work has added substantially to Ireland’s national literature. In 2019, having developed dementia, she moved into a nursing home outside Dublin, where she died in early 2025.