Gough, Julian


Lifeb. London; brought up in Tipperary; ed. in Galway University (NUG), and grad. in philosophy; issued Juno & Juliet (2001); also Jude in Ireland (2008); winner of the BBC National Short Story Prize with "The Orphan and the Mob", April 2007 (worth £15K), being the preface to Jude - Level 1 (2007), republished as Jude in Ireland and issued with Jude in London (2011); challenged the award of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize to Will Self, and stole the prize pig - an adventure filmed for Youtube; contrib. post-Celtic Tiger story to Irish Times; contrib.“Earworm” to Kevin Barry, ed., Town & Country: Irish Short Stories (Faber 2013).


The Julian Gough autograph webpage - online - includes his essay
“The State of Irish Literature” (2010).

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Quotations
Celtic crash: ‘We were coming out of centuries of relentless, grinding national poverty.When you’,re poor you don’,t deed to cultivate the habit of restraint. You spend till you run out of money; you drink till you run out of money. Poverty stops you killing yourself drinking, and lack of credit stops you killing yourself with debt. But, give a poor society unlimited drink, or unlimited credit, and it’s likely to end badly.’ Further: ‘What’s tragic is that some people have been destroyed psychologically by their losses. But what is marvellous is that most people have not been.Their identity was not tied up with their property; there self-esteem did not collapse along with their bank balance.’ (Quoted in Conor Pope, ‘The Chastened Consumer’, in The Irish Times, 14 Dec. 2013, Weekend Review [p.1]; no ref.)

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