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Da | Author Biography

Hugh Leonard is the pen name of John Keyes Byrne, who was born on November 9, 1926, in Dublin, Ireland. Leonard is the adopted son of Nicholas Keyes, a gardener, and Margaret (Doyle) Keyes, a homemaker. He was born John Byrne to an unmarried woman named Annie Byrne, and later added the surname of his adopted father as his middle name. In 1941, Leonard attended College Glasthule on scholarship. In 1945, he was employed by the Irish civil service as a writer in the Department of Lands, where he worked until 1959. S. P. Gallagher relates in his introduction to The Selected Plays of Hugh Leonard that ‘‘Leonard had never seen a play until during his first year in the civil service. A colleague derided his ignorance of theatre and goaded him into attending an Abbey Theatre production of Sean O'Casey's Plough and the Stars.’’ Inspired by this experience, Leonard began to write plays and participate in amateur theatrical productions.

In 1954, Leonard submitted his first play, The Italian Road, to the Abbey Theatre, which rejected it. In 1956, however, his play The Big Birthday was accepted by the Abbey Theatre. His pen name was acquired at this point because of the fact that he had sarcastically used the name of one of his characters from his earlier rejected play as the author's name of his second play, which was later accepted.

In 1955, he married Paule Jacquet, a Belgian, with whom he had a daughter named Danielle. After leaving the civil service, Leonard wrote radio serials. In 1961, he became a script editor for Granada Television in Manchester, England, and worked there until 1963. He supported himself and his family as a freelance writer in London from 1963 to 1970, writing television serials, film scripts, and television adaptations. Leonard returned to Dublin in 1970, becoming the literary editor for the Abbey Theatre from 1976 to 1977 and program director for the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1978. During the 1970s, Leonard also published weekly columns in Hibernia and the Sunday Independent. Leonard currently lives in Ireland.