Life

Hamilton's mother was a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 who travelled to Ireland

Ireland

Ireland is an island to the northwest of continental Europe. It is the third-largest island in Europe and the twentieth-largest island on Earth...

 in 1949 for a pilgrimage

Pilgrimage

A pilgrimage is a journey or search of great moral or spiritual significance. Typically, it is a journey to a shrine or other location of importance to a person's beliefs and faith...

, married an Irishman, and settled in the country. His father was a militant nationalist who insisted that his children should speak only German

German language

German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....

 or Irish

Irish language

Irish , also known as Irish Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Indo-European language family, originating in Ireland and historically spoken by the Irish people. Irish is now spoken as a first language by a minority of Irish people, as well as being a second language of a larger proportion of...

, but not English

English language

English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...

, a prohibition the young Hugo resisted inwardly. "The prohibition against English made me see that language as a challenge. Even as a child I spoke to the walls in English and secretly rehearsed dialogue I heard outside," he wrote later.

As a consequence of this, he grew up with three languages - English, Irish and German - and a sense of never really belonging to any: "There were no other children like me, no ethnic groups that I could attach myself to".

Hamilton became a journalist, and then a writer of short stories and novels. His first three novels were set in Central Europe

Central Europe

Central Europe or alternatively Middle Europe is a region of the European continent lying between the variously defined areas of Eastern and Western Europe...

. Then came Headbanger (1996), a darkly comic crime novel set in Dublin and featuring detective Pat Coyne. A sequel, Sad Bastard, followed in 1998.

Following a year spent in Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

 on a cultural scholarship, he completed his memoir of childhood, The Speckled People (2003), which went on to achieve widespread international acclaim. Telling the story through the eyes of his childhood self, it painfully evoked the struggle to make sense of a bizarre adult world. It "triumphantly avoids the Angela's Ashes style of sentimental nostalgia and victim claims," wrote Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee

Hermione Lee, CBE is President of Wolfson College, Oxford and was lately Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature in the University of Oxford and Professorial Fellow of New College. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature.-Biography:Hermione Lee grew up in...

 in The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

. "The cumulative effect is to elevate an act of scrupulous remembering into a work of art," commented James Lasdun

James Lasdun

James Lasdun is an English author, poet and academic. Lasdun was one of the judges for the 2008 Griffin Poetry Prize.-Career:...

 in the New York Times. The story is picked up in the 2006 volume, The Sailor in the Wardrobe.

In May 2007, German publisher Luchterhand published Die redselige Insel (The Talkative Island), in which Hamilton retraced the journey Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Böll

Heinrich Theodor Böll was one of Germany's foremost post-World War II writers. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972.- Biography :...

 made in Ireland that was to be the basis of his bestselling book Irisches Tagebuch (Irish Journal) in 1957. Hamilton's most recent novel, Disguise

Disguise (novel)

Disguise is a 2008 novel by the Irish writer Hugo Hamilton set in Germany.-Synopsis:The book begins during the Battle of Berlin. A mother, Mrs Liedmann and her son are living in a house in the city. Her husband is fighting for the German forces on the Western front. A bomb falls on their house and...

 was published on June 6, 2008.

Hugo Hamilton lives in Dublin, Ireland. In 1992 he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature

Rooney Prize for Irish Literature

The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature was created in 1976 by the notable Irish American businessman, Dr Dan Rooney, owner and chairman of the NFL franchise, Pittsburgh Steelers....

. Sang impur, the French translation of The Speckled People, won the Prix Femina Etranger

Prix Femina

The Prix Femina is a French literary prize created in 1904 by 22 writers for the magazine La Vie heureuse . The prize is decided each year by an exclusively female jury, although the authors of the winning works do not have to be women...

 in 2004 and Il cane che abbaiava alle onde, the Italian translation of the memoir, won the Premio Giuseppe Berto in 2004.

Novels

• Surrogate City (1990) ISBN 0-571-14432-2
• The Last Shot (1991) ISBN 0-571-16391-2
• The Love Test (1995) ISBN 0-571-16954-6
• Headbanger (1996) ISBN 0-436-20405-3
• Sad Bastard (1998) ISBN 0-436-20490-8
• Sucking Diesel (2002) ISBN 0-09-928325-5
• Disguise
  Disguise (novel)
  Disguise is a 2008 novel by the Irish writer Hugo Hamilton set in Germany.-Synopsis:The book begins during the Battle of Berlin. A mother, Mrs Liedmann and her son are living in a house in the city. Her husband is fighting for the German forces on the Western front. A bomb falls on their house and...
  
  (2008) ISBN 0-007-19216-9
• Hand in the Fire (2010)

Memoirs

• The Speckled People (2003) ISBN 0-00-715663-4
• The Sailor in the Wardrobe (2006) ISBN 0-00-719217-7 [US Title: The Harbor Boys ISBN 0-06-078467-9]

Foreign-Language Versions

• Hand in the Fire: Der irische Freund, (Luchterhand, München, Germany 2011)
• The Speckled People: Gescheckte Menschen (Germany, 2004); Sang impur (France, 2004); Il cane che abbaiava alle onde (Italy, 2004); El perro que ladraba a las olas (Spain, 2005); Sproetenkoppen (Netherlands, 2006); Gent mestissa (Andorra, 2007); Белязаните (Bulgaria, 2008).
• Headbanger: Der letzte Held von Dublin (Germany, 1999); Déjanté (France, 2006); Lo scoppiato (Italy, 2000)
• The Sailor in the Wardrobe: Der Matrose im Schrank (Germany, 2006); Le marin de Dublin (France, 2006); De verdwijntruc (Netherlands, 2006); Il marinaio nell'armadio (Italy, 2007)
• Sad Bastard: Ein schlechter Verlierer (Germany, 2001)
• The Last Shot: Kriegsliebe (Germany, 2002); L'ultimo sparo (Italy, 2006); Het laatste schot (Netherlands, 2004)
• Surrogate City: Berlin sous la Baltique (France, 1992)

Further reading

• Official Homepage of Hugo Hamilton
• "Speaking to the walls in English", by Hugo Hamilton, Powells.com, undated.
• Review of The Speckled People by Hermione Lee in The Guardian, 2003
• Review of The Speckled People by James Lasdun, New York Times 2003
• "Hugo Hamilton," Close to the Next Moment: Interviews from a Changing Ireland by Jody Allen Randolph. Manchester: Carcanet, 2010.