Robert McLiam Wilson – författare

'I'm Ripley Bogle. I'm the prince of the pavements, I'm the Parkbench King and the cold winds of the outside permanently fleck my flesh. To come with me, you must brave the air and the wide, bare boredom. The vast outdoors is my house and hall. It's with purpose, fear and gratitude that I stalk the streets of the city.'As the scene shifts from the streets of London, to Oxford and Belfast, the tramp, Ripley Bogle, narrates his gripping and alarming story in which it becomes increasingly difficult to tell what is true and what is fiction.

Eureka Street is a story of Belfast in the 1990s, six months before and after another ceasefire. It is the story of Chuckie Lurgan, fat, Protestant and poor, who suddenly becomes wealthy by various legal but immoral means; and of Jake Jackson, Catholic reformed tough guy, who has been abandoned by his English girlfriend and is looking for love. Meanwhile the strange letters 'OTG' start appearing on walls and paving stones throughout the city.

Ripley Bogle, one of the most memorable Irish characters since Leopold Bloom roamed Dublin, is a self-proclaimed bum, an excoriating and expectorating Irish expatriate from Belfast, and a Cambridge dropout. Penniless but unbowed, he wanders the streets of London, treating the reader to the ruminations of his teeming, romping imagination. Here lies the mystery and wonder of this book: How could anyone of Bogle's prodigious intelligence and powers of perception end up in vagabondage? Winner of the Irish Book Award, Ripley Bogle spreads before us a fabulous beggar's banquet: a running commentary of bawdy brilliance and dyspeptic hilarity. No cow is too sacred for Bogle. After acquainting us with his birth and family ("the usual cast from subhuman Gaelic scumbuckets"), he relives his past ("the bathetic dribble of error and reparation"), describes his first experiences with love ("the silken clock that backs the witless levitation of the penis"), and analyzes his Irishness ("crap promoted by Americans and professors of English literature"). Though he gnaws at the fringes of society, Bogle's keen mind can skewer its fat heart.Chain-smoking his way around London, young Bogle looks to stitch together the pieces of his ragged life--to forgive himself his sins and to find a place of warmth within his own dark thoughts.