List Of Writers

BARRY, DES

You can contact Des through his publishers, Jonathan Cape on: 0207 840 8400

Desmond Barry was born and brought up in Wales, on the notorious Gurnos Estate in Merthyr Tydfil. He gained a place at University College London. After his degree, he taught English in Italy, and then in 1986 moved to the US where he did a bewildering array of jobs before embarking on a writing programme at Columbia University. While there, he studied under Booker prize–winner Peter Carey, and worked as Carey’s researcher on his novel Jack Maggs.

When he began writing his own debut novel, The Chivalry of Crime (Jonathan Cape, 2001), Barry did exhaustive research on Jesse James, and decided to study Stanislavski’s method acting in order to get into the heads of James and his cohorts.

From 1999-2001, in the summer months, Barry worked in Tibet as part of a non-governmental organisation. He’s influenced by Tibetan teachings on meditation which he’s practiced meditation for over 25 years.

He teaches creative writing at the University of Glamorgan.

The Chivalry of Crime (Jonathan Cape, 2001) was voted Best First Novel of the Year by the Western Writers of America and was shortlisted for the 2002 Wales Book of the Year Award.  A Bloody Good Friday (Jonathan Cape, 2002) is set in his home town in 1977. Cressida’s Bed (Jonathan Cape, 2004) was on the 2005 Wales Book of the Year Long List.

His shorter prose has appeared in Granta, The New Yorker, The Big Issue and in the anthologies Wales, Half Welsh (Bloomsbury, 2004), London Noir (Serpent’s Tail, 2006) and Sea Stories (National Maritime Museum, 2007). He won a Creative Wales Award in 2006 for the Far South Project, which is ongoing. His play Jetlag was the Cardiff part of Three Cities, a trilogy of plays written in collaboration with writers from Buenos Aires and Melbourne and performed in Cardiff in 2007 at Chapter Arts Centre. The trilogy will be performed in Buenos Aires in 2009. Barry worked with Uruguayan photographer, Diego Vidart, to produce ’The Falkland Diaries’, an exhibition at the Wales Millennium centre in 2007, and on the web at www.falkland-diaries.org.uk.

The photograph of Des featured above is copyrighted to Diego Vidart

Reviews:
With respect to The Chivalry of Crime (Jonathan Cape, 2001)

”… debut novelist Barry offers a detailed, well-researched and dynamic retelling…”
Publishers Weekly

With respect to A Bloody Good Friday (Jonathan Cape, 2002)

”…A Bloody Good Friday is a riot in every sense…”
Esquire

”…An unmissable writer…”
GQ


Selected Publications:
The Chivalry of Crime (Jonathan Cape, 2001)
A Bloody Good Friday (Jonathan Cape, 2002)
Cressida’s Bed (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Contributed to:
Wales, Half Welsh (contributor)  (Bloomsbury, 2004)
London Noir (contributor) (Serpent’s Tail, 2006)
Sea Stories (contributor) (National Maritime Museum, 2007)

The Chivalry of Crime (Jonathan Cape, 2001)

The story of one of America’s most compelling figures, the outlaw gunslinger Jesse James. Bringing real and invented characters together in a dramatic and moving story, The Chivalry of Crime mingles the life of an imaginary boy with a factually faithful account of the lives of Jesse James and Robert Ford, the man who killed James, in the days when shootists were legends. Joshua, a young, idealistic friend of Ford’s, is determined to get a gun of his own - a desire that puts his own life in jeopardy and reveals the painful realities masked by America’s most cherished myths.

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A Bloody Good Friday (Jonathan Cape, 2002)

Good Friday, 1977. Merthyr Tydfil. At twenty to midnight a dozen different forces converge - Macky, just out of jail; the gippos and their knives; the Shop Boys, fifty or sixty skinheads in fanatical pursuit of recreational violence; P. C. Phillips, the young copper with something to prove; Mohan Singh, proud owner of the Taj Mahal curry house. The result: mayhem. ’RACE RIOT ERUPTS IN VALLEYS TOWN’. And witness to it all, Davey Daunt, a spazzy with a leg brace, the only one who knows what really happened.

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Cressida’s Bed (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

Dr Christina Devenish, Suffragist and Theosophist, is invited to visit her to father in Bhutan, where he is an advisor at the court of the Shabdrung, Bhutan’s version of the Dalai Lama.

Arriving in Calcutta, Christina joins a British expedition to Bhutan led by Major Owen Davies, a tough Political Officer. Davies has the covert brief to resolve, even by ’drastic action’, the rivalry between the Shabdrung and the Maharaja, Bhutan’s temporal ruler. Christina’s father is deeply embroiled in the Great Game: and for Davies, he’s on the wrong side. As Christina and Owen Davies journey toward the Himalayas, they begin a hungry love affair, knowing that other loyalties will soon intrude; and when Christina meets the Shabdrung, the young god-king’s effect on her leads to a devastating final act.

To purchase this title from amazon.co.uk, please click on its front cover