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Desmond Barry Desmond Barry was born in Merthyr Tydfil, Wales. His father worked at a local factory, and his mother as a bookkeeper. He grew up watching television Westerns--"Wagon Train," "Rawhide," "Gunsmoke" and "Wyatt Earp"--before he graduated to harder stuff: Arthur Penn's "The Left Handed Gun," Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone. Growing up in Merthyr was growing up in a frontier town. In many a pub on a Friday or Saturday night, scenes that could have come from The Wild Bunch regularly unfolded like a bad dream. From 1972 to 1975, he studied history at University College, London. After college, he worked in the Fawcett Library, attached to City of London Polytechnic, cataloging an archive of feminist texts that date from the sixteenth century to the present day. During a journey to Nepal and India in 1980, he began writing seriously, though mostly poetry, not fiction. From 1981 to 1985, he worked in Italy as an English teacher in Rome and in Tuscany. In 1985 he moved to the United States, which has been his home ever since. To support his writing he worked as a construction laborer in Massachusetts and San Francisco, then in the UCSF Hospital Building Management Department, where he coordinated repairs to equipment and physical plant and was part of the emergency-response team for the hospital during the San Francisco earthquake.
In 1988, he performed a multimedia poetic drama called "Durante's Inferno," at Life on the Water Theater, San Francisco. The piece was based on the Divine Comedy but reimagined as a pub crawl through Merthyr. From 1994 to 1997 he studied fiction writing at Columbia. His first novel, The Chivalry of Crime, was published by Little Brown and Company in the USA and by Jonathan Cape in Britain. His second novel, A Bloody Good Friday, will be published by Jonathan Cape in January 2002. | |||||||||||||||
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