Dominic Harkin reports on the 8th International Flann O'Brien Conference – An Fód Dúchais: Home Heritage and Origins, The Alley Theatre, Stabane, 25‒27 June 2025.

This article spotlights H. L. Morrow as a significant adaptor of Brian O’Nolan’s writing for radio. As well as adapting Thirst as the half-hour television broadcast ‘After Hours’ for the BBC, Morrow a...

Radio broadcasting has major significance for O’Nolan’s career. This article reads O’Nolan’s work within the context of contemporary theories of radio, arguing that radio transmission was a live event...

Radio broadcasting has major significance for O’Nolan’s career. This article reads O’Nolan’s work within the context of contemporary theories of radio, arguing that radio transmission was a live event up to the 1930s and is critical to the oeuvre. It aims to understand broadcast radio in the context of its modernist, popular and avant-garde resonances by claiming that texts written for unrecorded, live radio production rely on a broadcasting frame that is socially and politically constructed. The referent is not the radio-text per se, but the context of live radio broadcasting. The central role of communications technology in O’Nolan’s life and work revolves around his early radio exposure and experience. Critical methodologies that aim to examine an autonomous body of work for radio by a single author disregard the aesthetics of collaboration, in-between-ness, and technological constraints inherent in radio production during this period. Engaging this context, this article begins with the global development of radio in the 1920s and 30s, before moving onto Irish radio, and then considers theories of radio and sound that were emerging at the time O’Nolan began publishing his early work, which in turn demonstrates the centrality of the wireless as a technological context for Flann O’Brien studies, for late-modernism, and for the popular imagination in twentieth-century Ireland.    

This article spotlights H. L. Morrow as a significant adaptor of Brian O’Nolan’s writing for radio. As well as adapting Thirst as the half-hour television broadcast ‘After Hours’ for the BBC, Morrow a...

This article spotlights H. L. Morrow as a significant adaptor of Brian O’Nolan’s writing for radio. As well as adapting Thirst as the half-hour television broadcast ‘After Hours’ for the BBC, Morrow a...

Radio broadcasting has major significance for O’Nolan’s career. This article reads O’Nolan’s work within the context of contemporary theories of radio, arguing that radio transmission was a live event...

Radio broadcasting has major significance for O’Nolan’s career. This article reads O’Nolan’s work within the context of contemporary theories of radio, arguing that radio transmission was a live event...

Over 128 years of moving images from Northern Ireland, featuring amateur and professional films from 1897 to 2025, brought to you by Northern Ireland Screen.

Winners Announced! Every two years, to coincide with the International Flann O’Brien Society conference, the Society awards official prizes to the best article/book chapter and best single author or e...

This article features a detailed discussion of Brian O’Nolan’s educational development as a writer and thinker. Breandán Ó Conaire, author of the pioneering study Myles na Gaeilge (1986), unveils the ...

This essay seeks to enrich and complicate the evermore detailed picture which we have of O'Nolan as a cross-media writer. In particular, this essay attends to the conversation between O’Nolan’s effort...

Katherine and Toby dissect death in 'Two in One' before exploring Irish executions, reading Achille Mbembe's necropolitics and turning to Flann, the energy humanities, and the geological turn.

Podcast Episode · Radio Myles: the Flann O'Brien Podcast · 15/10/2025 · 38m

Dissonant Waves tells the life story of Ernst Schoen, a pioneer of early radio and the Leader of the Programming Department at Südwestdeutsche Rundfunkdienst AG (SWZ), the Frankfurt regional radio station. It also tells the story of his social milieu – musicians, artists, philosophers and writers which included Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and other well-known figures. The writers follow in the spirit of Ernst Schoen’s experimental aesthetics, innovating the biographical genre by presenting a fragmented, non-linear narrative, especially in the first part of the book. For Flann O’Brien scholars and enthusiasts, the volume offers an insight into the avant-garde possibilities of mass communications media and radio in particular. Both Flann and Schoen challenged the distinction between high art and popular culture in their own ways and engaged in a search for new means of expression. 

This article argues that Brian O’Nolan’s fiction consistently stages sound as a material force, one that becomes most tangible at the moment of its mediation. Drawing on theories of sonic materiality ...

This article features a detailed discussion of Brian O’Nolan’s educational development as a writer and thinker. Breandán Ó Conaire, author of the pioneering study Myles na Gaeilge (1986), unveils the ...

The death has occurred of Breandán Ó Conaire of Portmarnock, Dublin Ireland, on 21/07/2025. You can view the full death notice and add your condolences here.

Although the Niall Montgomery papers housed at the National Library of Ireland shows that Niall Montgomery contributed to the Cruiskeen Lawn, researchers without access to Dublin have been unable to i...

During the 1950s and 1960s influenza was a recurring theme in the Cruiskeen Lawn, a satirical column by Myles na Copaleen (Flann O’Brien) in The Irish Times. The columns’ engagement arose from Irel...

This article proposes Irish radio broadcasting as an unexplored context for new directions in Flann O’Brien studies. Brian O’Nolan’s involvement in Irish radio spans at least two decades, from the ear...

This article explores how the meteorological, societal, social, and literary senses of atmosphere fertilise each other in Brian O’Nolan’s writing through the theoretical frameworks and analytical tool...

This note details ‘Cultural Affairs,’ a newly discovered article that Brian O’Nolan contributed, under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen, to a 1953 special supplement of The Statist magazine dedicated to ‘The Economy of Ireland.’ In its primary aim of advertising Irish industry to English investors, ‘The Economy of Ireland’ reflects the shift in post-war Irish economic policy away from the protectionist Free State era and towards the increasingly open economy of the 1950s and 60s. Myles’s contribution addresses the supplement’s theme by arguing for a form of cultural liberalism that rejects isolationism and bad-faith nationalism by opening Irish culture to foreign influence, rather than packaging it for export to foreign markets. However, ‘Cultural Affairs’ also departs from the economic supplement’s focus on courting foreign investment by advocating for meaningful government subsidies for Irish cultural regeneration. 

This note details ‘Cultural Affairs,’ a newly discovered article that Brian O’Nolan contributed, under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen, to a 1953 special supplement of The Statist magazine dedicated to...

Reading ‘The Martyr’s Crown’ as a parody of the Biblical Annunciation to the Virgin Mary, this article presents a previously unrecognised intertextual source to which the title of Br...

This note details ‘Cultural Affairs,’ a newly discovered article that Brian O’Nolan contributed, under the pen name Myles na Gopaleen, to a 1953 special supplement of The Statist magazine dedicated to...

Crossing the boundaries of a single-author study, this book uncovers Flann O'Brien's attempt to forge a commercially successful Irish literary project from inte…

An Saol Bocht: Leabhar tábhachtach ar shaothar Bhriain Uí Nualláin, a thugann faoina bhfuil scríofa faoi a scrúdú as an nua, agus a chuireann leis sin eolas úr atá tagtha chun solais ó shin.

Radio Myles: the Flann O'Brien Podcast · Episode

This article explores Brian O’Nolan’s (Flann O’Brien’s, Myles na gCopaleen’s) relation to John Millington Synge. Synge (1871–1909) was the premier dramatist of the Irish Revival, and O’Nolan’s respons...

Flann O’Brien and the Nonhuman is the first book to explore in detail the author’s interest in the agency, materiality, and potential sentience of enviro...

Sincere thanks to all who voted in the 2025 International Flann O’Brien Society Awards. The votes have been tallied and we are now delighted to announce the shortlisted candidates. Based …