Bernard Maclaverty Biography

Northern Irish novelist and short-story writer, born in Belfast. From 1960 to 1970 he worked as a laboratory technician before taking an English degree at Queen's University, Belfast. Upon graduating he moved to Scotland and taught there until 1981, when he became a fulltime writer. MacLaverty's fiction has tended to concern themes of victimization, loneliness, and the destruction of desire by glacial social forces: as in Secrets (1977), his first collection of short stories. Lamb (1980), his first novel, portrays the efforts of a disillusioned Christian Brother to rescue both himself and a young boy from the brutal indifference of a remote institution. MacLaverty's second novel, Cal (1983), which has been produced successfully as a film, deals with the consequences of political violence and guilt upon the individual and succeeds in representing an intensely human aspect of the contemporary crisis in Ulster. MacLaverty's further volumes of short stories include A Time to Dance and Other Stories (1982), The Great Profundo and Other Stories (1987), and Walking the Dog and Other Stories (1994).