Jamie O'Neill (born 1 January 1962) is an Irish author. His critically acclaimed novel, At Swim, Two Boys (2001), earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent praise as the natural successor to James Joyce, Flann O'Brien and Samuel Beckett. He is currently living in Gortachalla in County Galway, having previously lived and worked in England for two decades. O'Neill's work follows the imaginative route in Irish literature, unlike his realist contemporaries such as Colm Tóibín or John McGahern. Terry Pender commented on At Swim, Two Boys: "With only this work O'Neill can take his rightful place among the great Irish writers beginning with Joyce and ending with Roddy Doyle". Background and education O'Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1962 the youngest of four children and was educated at Presentation College, Glasthule, County Dublin, run by the Presentation Brothers, and (in his words) "the city streets of London, the beaches of Greece." He was raised in a home without books, and first discovered that books "could be fun" when he read Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott, a copy of which he had received as a Christmas gift. It took him two weeks and was the first book he ever finished. O'Neill was unhappy at home; he had a very difficult relationship with his father and ran away at age 17. He was raised a Catholic and has admitted to a fondness for the language of the Catholic Church, saying, "I like the words, the distinctions they have for sins. For example, "morose delectation." Beautiful. It's the dwelling on pleasure from sins already committed. I kind of admire something that's seen so far inside the soul that it can work out names for these things. Of course, I don't believe a word of it". O'Neill lists as his favourite books: Ulysses, by James Joyce, The Last of the Wine, by Mary Renault, Hadrian the Seventh, by Frederick Rolfe (Frederick Baron Corvo), The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon, The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Siege of Krishnapur, by J. G. Farrell, One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel García Márquez, The Third Policeman, by Flann O'Brien, The Swimming Pool Library, by Alan Hollinghurst, and The Lost Language of Cranes by David Leavitt. He was one of the Irish delegates at the European Writers Conference in Istanbul