Tomás O'Crohan – författare

Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to observe and describe the world. His book is a valuable description of a new vanished way of life; his sole purpose in writing it was in his own words, 'to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again'. The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.

Written between 1919 and 1925, 'Island Cross-Talk' was the first book to come out of the Blasket Islands - that tiny, remote community off the west coast of Kerry. Springing from a powerful oral tradition, it captured the moment of transition from speech to writing, and sowed the seeds of a rich and extraordinary flowering of literature that was to make the Blaskets famous throughout the world. In these vivid, unadorned sketches from his diary, Tomas O'Crohan writes from the immediacy of his experience: the beauty and the dangers of the island and the sea; the hardship, poverty, and hunger; but also the flashes of humour, the friendships, the intensity of life. In 1953 the Great Blasket was abandoned to the seagulls and the silence. Tomas O'Crohan composed his own epitaph, and that of his community, when he wrote 'the like of us will never be again'.