Seosamh Mac Grianna
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Seosamh Mac Grianna (1900 – 1990) was an Irish writer, under the pen-name Iolann Fionn. He was born into a family of poets and storytellers in Ranafast, County Donegal, at a time of linguistic and cultural change, which included his brothers Séamus Ó Grianna and Seán Bán Mac Grianna.
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[edit] Education and early activities
He was educated at St. Eunan's College, Letterkenny, and St Columb's College in Derry. He trained as a teacher in St Patrick's College, Dublin, from which he graduated in 1921. He became ivolved in the armed struggle and was interned as a republican for fifteen months. He began a teaching career but, with his poetic and independent character, soon discovered that his vocation did not lie there.
[edit] Creative career
Mac Grianna started writing in the early 1920s, and his creative period lasted some fifteen years . He wrote essays, short stories, travel and historical works, a famous autobiography, Mo Bhealach Féin, and a novel, as well as translating many books. He was imbued with a strong, oral traditional culture from his childhood, and this permeated his writings, particularly in the early years.
[edit] Latter career and death
Towards the end of his career, Mac Grianna grew increasingly analytical and critical as he examined the changing face of the Irish-speaking districts and the emergence of an Anglicised Ireland with no loyalty to, or sympathy with, a heroic and cultured past.
He was probably the greatest Gaeltacht writer of his time, whose work had developed considerably before he was stricken by a severe depressive psychosis in 1935, so that he had to spend the rest of his life – more than fifty years – at a psychiatric hospital. [1]
