Biography (Beathaisnéis)

John W. Hurley (Seán L. Úhúrthailé)

John W. Hurley is a graphic artist, writer, video producer and researcher, whose father emigrated to the United States from County Kerry, Ireland. Raised in an Irish-american household with a rich military heritage, he began exploring Ireland’s warrior traditions at an early age, and has studied both Irish and Asian fighting styles. His first book on Irish martial arts, Irish Gangs and Stick-Fighting In The Works of William Carleton was published in 2002. It is the first major work to examine the role played by western martial arts - fencing, wrestling, boxing - in the works of a European novelist. His next book Shillelagh: The Story Of The Irish Stick, is due for publication in the Fall of 2002; more books on Irish martial arts are slated for 2003.

William Carleton (Liam O’Cathalain)

William Carleton was Ireland’s first great short-story writer and novelist of international repute. Today he is mostly forgotten, as his works have been largely overshadowed by subsequent generations of Irish writers. Carleton was a native Irish speaker, born in 1794 at Prillisk, near the town of Clogher in County Tyrone, the youngest of fourteen children.

The culture Carleton experienced while growing up in Tyrone profoundly influenced his life, and set him on a journey of self-discovery reminiscent of that experienced at a later time by the Irish writer James Joyce. Like Joyce, Carleton agonized over the issues of religion, language and politics for most of his life, eventually settling into a kind of spiritual and geographic exile. And like Joyce, Carleton spent most of his professional life as a writer recounting the characters and traditions he experienced while gowing up in Ireland.

As he did so, Carleton was aware, perhaps better than many others, that the Gaelic Ireland of his youth was changing fast, and that many of its traditions - both good and bad - might be lost and forgotten forever. But Carleton was an insightful social historian, anthropologist and, in his own way, patriot as well. In the process of writing, Carleton consciously preserved for future generations, the cultural traditions of his youth.

Through his stories Carleton documented and forever preserved the disappearing cultural traditions of the 19th century Gaelic Irish, including the traditions of Ireland’s martial arts "shillelagh" culture. In Irish Gangs and Stick-Fighting In The Works of William Carleton, author John W. Hurley has brought together and explained those works of Carleton which document and describe these Irish martial arts traditions.