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Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
She has worked as literary editor for The Dubliner and contributor to the Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge University Press).
Her ‘gonzo’ biography of the Irish Romantic poet, James Clarence Mangan, Finding Mangan, the Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet is published by Gill Books in August 2024. She lives in Dublin.
Represented By: Ivan Mulcahy
She has worked as literary editor for The Dubliner and contributor to the Dictionary of Irish Biography (Cambridge University Press).
Her ‘gonzo’ biography of the Irish Romantic poet, James Clarence Mangan, Finding Mangan, the Lives and Afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet is published by Gill Books in August 2024. She lives in Dublin.
Author: Ha-Joon Chang
Genres: Biography
The lives and afterlives of Ireland’s National Poet.
June 1849: Dr William Wilde, passing a wretched hovel in Dublin’s Liberties, discovers James Clarence Mangan in a state of indescribable misery and squalor. Aged just 46, the man dubbed ‘Ireland’s National Poet’ is about to succumb to the cholera epidemic that is gripping famine-ravaged Ireland.
August 2008: Writer Bridget Hourican encounters Mangan during a Liberties lock-in with that other great Irish poet, Shane MacGowan, who found inspiration in Mangan’s poetry.
Alcoholic, opium addict, Romantic, Famine poet, Dublin street character and hero of James Joyce, the mercurial Mangan begins to obsess Bridget. The surviving biographical material – scant, subjective, sometimes falsified – both fascinates and frustrates her and she determines to find him.
As the lines between research and real life become blurred, Bridget starts to notice aspects of her life bleeding into Mangan’s. An obsession becomes a haunting and she realises that the only way to truly reach Mangan is to reckon with her own ghosts.
For fans of A Ghost in the Throat, Super-Infinite and the Master.
FINDING MANGAN was September book of the month at Hodges Figgis – one of Ireland’s biggest bookstores – and ranked 6th on the national bestseller list the month it was released.
Read more about the book in the Sunday Independent (twice), the Irish Independent Review, and the Irish Times.