Enda Walsh

Enda Walsh (born 1967) is an Irish playwright born in Dublin and currently living in London. Walsh attended the same secondary school where both Roddy Doyle and Paul Mercier taught. Having written for the Dublin Youth Theatre, he moved to Cork where he wrote Fishy Tales for the Graffiti Theatre Company, followed by Ginger Ale Boy for Corcadorca Theatre Company. His main breakthrough came with the production of his play Disco Pigs in collaboration with director Pat Kiernan of Corcadorca. Since then he moved to London, where he has been particularly prolific over the past six years, bringing his productions to seventeen stage plays, two radio plays and three screenplays. Winner of the 1997 Stewart Parker and the George Devine Awards, he won the 2006 Abbey Theatre Writer in Association Award and the 2010 Obie Award for playwriting. Productions of his plays at the Edinburgh Festival have won four Edinburgh Fringe First Awards, two Critic's Awards and a Herald Archangel Award (2008). His plays, notably Disco Pigs, Bedbound, Small Things, Chatroom, New Electric Ballroom and The Walworth Farce, have been translated into more than 20 languages and have had productions throughout Europe and in Australia, New Zealand and the U.S. He has written two radio plays, with Four Big Days in the Life of Dessie Banks for RTÉ winning the PPI Award for Best Radio Drama (2001) and The Monotonous Life of Little Miss P for the BBC commended at the Berlin Prix Europa (2003). His commissioned work includes plays for Paines Plough in London, the Druid Theatre in Galway, the Kammerspiele in Munich and the Royal National Theatre's Connections Project in London. He participated in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six, for which he wrote a piece based upon a chapter of the King James Bible. He has written the musical adaptation of the Oscar-winning film Once, which is appearing off-Broadway in December 2011 and transferring to Broadway in March 2012. He wrote the screenplay of the film Disco Pigs, which starred Cilian Murphy, and co-wrote the screenplay of Hunger which was directed by Steve McQueen and starred Michael Fassbender as Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who starved himself to death in protest over British rule. Hunger won numerous awards (see below) including the Caméra d'Or award at the Cannes Film Festival, Best Film Award from the Evening Standard British Film Awards 2009 and a nomination for Best British Film at the 62nd British Academy Film Awards. He wrote an adaptation of his play Chatroom for a film directed by Hideo Nakata which was selected for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival. He is currently under commission for three films, an adaptation of the children's story Island of the Aunts by Eva Ibbotson (for Cuba Pictures), a biography of Dusty Springfield entitled Dusty Springfield: Goddess of the Sixties and an adaptation of Gitta Sereny’s book Into That Darkness, about the life of Franz Stangl, the commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps.