Dancing at Lughnasa | Author Biography

Brian Friel was born near Omagh, County Tyrone, in Northern Ireland, on January 9,1929, to Patrick, a teacher, and Christina (MacLoone) Friel. When he was ten, the family moved to Londonderry, where his father became the principal at Long Tower School, and the young Friel attended St. Columb's College from 1941 to 1946. In 1946, he enrolled in a seminary at St. Patrick's college in Maynooth, from which he graduated with a B.A. in 1948. Friel subsequently abandoned his plans to enter the priesthood, and entered St. Joseph's Teacher Training College in Belfast, which he attended from 1949 to 1950.

Brian Friel
Brian Friel

From 1950 to 1960, Friel worked as a teacher in Londonderry, during which time many of his short stories were published in the New Yorker. Encouraged by this success, Friel quit teaching in 1960 to become a full-time writer of short stories and radio plays, as well as stage plays, which were produced at the Abbey Theater in Dublin. In 1954, he married Anne Morrison, with whom he had five children. To learn more about the theater, Friel spent six months in 1963 at the Tyrone Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

This experience was followed by the production of his first internationally successful stage play. Philadelphia, Here I Come! garnered critical and popular acclaim, first at the Dublin Theater Festival, in 1964, and then in New York and London. The play concerns the thoughts and memories of a young Irishman shortly before he leaves Ireland to emigrate to America. Philadelphia, Here I Come! ran for over 300 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater, Broadway's longest run of an Irish play. Friel subsequently produced approximately one play per year, garnering such awards at the New York Drama Critics Circle Award for best foreign play, 1989, for Aristocrats, and the Olivier Award, 1991, for Dancing at Lughnasa.

In 1980, Friel, along with Stephen Rea, founded the Field Day Theater Company in Northern Ireland to provide Irish playwrights with an outlet for works of social and political significance. Friel's most critically acclaimed play, Translations, was performed at the Field Day Theater that same year. Friel has lived in Donegal, Ireland, since 1973.