Philip MacCann

In 1999 The Observer newspaper selected him as one of twenty world authors expected to be important in the new millennium. But in fact, only a handful of stories subsequently appeared: in Granta magazine, the Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, The Dublin Review and The Irish Times. He has shown little interest in publishing since 1995, has had no public profile and could not be contacted over the creation of this site. His one small book continues to be praised and his silence still inspires some degree of curiosity on the Internet.

Born in Manchester, he was educated at Trinity College, Dublin and studied Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia under Malcolm Bradbury. His first book, The Miracle Shed (1995), a collection of short stories, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and in 2000 he was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize.

In the 1990s he was a literary journalist for the Guardian newspaper and the Spectator magazine and contributed frequently to Prospect Magazine and others. It was here that he made public a distinct classical aesthetic, statements about the ethical shortcomings of Art and he became known for his acerbic criticism of consumer capitalism. Even before the Miracle Shed was published he wrote in The Guardian of his reluctance to continue publishing literary art in what was much more than a populist climate: a culture oppressed and vandalized by the abuse of corporate power. His first short stories appeared in Faber's First Fictions, the New Yorker and New Writing 1 and 3 (Minerva/British Council). Criticising the writing of the day as "becalmed writing from a stagnant pool", The Guardian singled out MacCann for special praise: "Really blazes - this is what Literature is about."