Jack Holland

Jack Holland (4 June 1947 – 14 May 2004) was a journalist, novelist, and poet who built a reputation chronicling "The Troubles" in his native Northern Ireland. He published articles, short stories, four novels, and seven works of non-fiction, mostly dealing with the politics and cultural life of Northern Ireland. His last book, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice, was something of a departure from his usual writings, and its original publisher abandoned the finished manuscript shortly after Holland's death, which followed a brief struggle with cancer. However, the book was later published posthumously by a different publisher.

Early life Born in post-war Belfast to a working-class family, Jack Holland spent his first five years living with his extended family in a home above Dougall's Yard on May Street, where his paternal grandfather, William Henry Holland, a veteran who was wounded in the Battle of the Somme, was the stable keeper. Since his paternal grandmother, Mary Murphy Holland, was a Catholic and his grandfather a Protestant, he was raised in a "mixed" Catholic/Protestant household.

He attended St. Thomas' Secondary Intermediate School, where the headmaster was the writer Michael McLaverty and his English teacher Seamus Heaney. The first in his family to graduate from university, Holland studied at the University of Ulster's Magee College and Trinity College, Dublin. He then earned a master's degree in theoretical linguistics at Essex University in England. a newspaper owned by John Mulcahy and edited by Brian Trench. Holland worked briefly in 1976 for the BBC Northern Ireland, where he was a researcher for the weekly news programme Spotlight, working alongside Jeremy Paxman and other journalists. where his weekly column "A View North" had a devoted following. In the 1990s, he became a lecturer at the New York University School of Journalism, worked for Channel 4 in London, and co-scripted the documentary Daughters of the Troubles (produced by Marcia Rock). His knowledge of the Northern Irish political situation and his reporting of the terrorist conflict earned him the respect of the public and of influential policy-makers in Washington, London, and Dublin such as statesmen Ted Kennedy, Hillary Clinton. the President and Prime Minister of Ireland, and the Minister of State for Northern Ireland. The book was first published in 1994 and has since been reprinted.

Personal life In 1974, Holland married Mary Hudson, an American language teacher and translator. In 1975, their daughter Jenny Holland was born in Dublin. In the 1980s, they lived in Brooklyn, New York, before moving to Trevignano Romano, outside Rome in Italy. In the early 1990s, they returned to Belfast for several years before finally settling back in Brooklyn, where they remained until Holland died in 2004.

Holland spent the last years of his life exploring New York with his wife and working on his final manuscript. He died of cancer at the age of 56.

Books Too Long a Sacrifice, Dodd Mead & Company, 1981 The Prisoner's Wife, Dodd Mead & Company, 1981, Robert Hale, London, 1982, Poolbeg Press, Dublin 1995 Druid Time, Dodd Mead & Company, 1986 The American Connection, Viking Penguin, New York, 1987, Roberts Rinehart Publishers, 1987 The Fire Queen, The Penguin Group, New York, 1992 Walking Corpses, Torc, (division of Poolbeg Press,) Dublin, 1994 INLA: Deadly Divisions, (with Henry McDonald) Poolbeg Press, Dublin, 1994 Phoenix: Policing the Shadows, (with Susan Phoenix) Hodder & Stoughton, 1996 & 2004, about the Chinook helicopter crash in June 1994 in Scotland, which killed the top anti-terrorist brass of the British Army and Northern Ireland police force Hope Against History, Henry Holt & Company, New York, 1999 Misogyny, the World's Oldest Prejudice, Constable & Robinson (UK) / Carroll & Graf (US), 2006