Joseph O'Neill

Joseph O'Neill is an Irish novelist and non-fiction writer. O'Neill's novel Netherland was awarded the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

Early life Joseph O'Neill was born in Cork, Ireland, on 23 February 1964. He is of half-Irish and half-Turkish ancestry.

O'Neill's parents moved around much in O'Neill's youth: O'Neill spent time in Mozambique as a toddler and in Turkey until the age of four, and he also lived in Iran. Since 1998 he has lived in New York City.

Career

Writing O'Neill is the author of five novels. He is best known for Netherland, which was published in May 2008 and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review, where it was called "the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we've yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell". It was included in The New York Times list of the 10 Best Books of 2008. Literary critic James Wood called it "one of the most remarkable postcolonial books I have ever read". In an interview with the BBC in June 2009, US President Barack Obama revealed that he was reading it, describing it as "an excellent novel."

Among the books on the longlist, it was the favourite to win the Man Booker Prize. However, on 9 September 2008, the Booker shortlist was announced, and the novel failed to make the list. The book received the 2009 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2009 Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was shortlisted for the Dublin International IMPAC Award.

His next novel, The Dog (2014), was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, named a Notable Book of 2014 by The New York Times, and shortlisted for the Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction. His most recent novel, Godwin, was published in June 2024. It was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award.

O'Neill is also the author of Good Trouble (2018), a collection of short stories, most of which first appeared in the New Yorker or Harper's magazine. Two of his stories have been awarded an O. Henry prize. Others have been anthologized in:

New Irish Short Stories (ed. Joseph O'Connor) (Faber & Faber) (2011) Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories (ed. David Marcus) (Faber & Faber) (2007) Dislocation: Stories from a New Ireland (ed. Caroline Walsh) (Carroll & Graf) (2003) Phoenix Irish Short Stories (ed. David Marcus) (Phoenix) (1999)

O'Neill has also written a non-fiction book, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, which was a New York Times Notable Book for 2002 and a Book of the Year for the Economist and the Irish Times.

In 2019, O'Neill began to publish political essays in the New York Review of Books. He has also written literary and cultural criticism, notably for The Atlantic Monthly.

Teaching He is a Distinguished Visiting Professor of Written Arts at Bard College.

Personal life O'Neill speaks English, French and Dutch. His love of cricket continues and he is an active player . In an interview with The Paris Review in 2014 O'Neill said, explaining his interest in writing about Dubai in The Dog, "I’ve moved around so much and lived in so many different places that I don’t really belong to a particular place." He lives in Brooklyn with his partner, writer Rivka Galchen.