During his stay, Writer in Residence Joseph O’Neill will also participate in a program that will be set up by the John Adams Institute to celebrate 400 years of relations between New York and Amsterdam.
Joseph O’Neill was born in Cork, Ireland in 1964 and grew up in Mozambique, Iran, Turkey and The Netherlands, where he attended boarding school at The Hague. He holds a law degree from Cambridge University, and practiced full time as a barrister in London from 1990 to 1998, specializing in business law. O’Neill took a year off from work to write his first novel, This is the life, which was published in 1991. In 1995 his second novel The Breezes was published. Three years later O’Neill moved to New York City, where he presently lives in the Chelsea Hotel with his wife and three sons.
O’Neill’s most recent novel, Netherland, was published in May 2008 and was featured on the cover of the New York Times Book Review where it was called
‘the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.’
The novel was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize, and O’Neill received the 2008 GQ Writer of the Year award. Netherland will be translated into 12 languages, including Dutch. Publishing house De Bezige Bij expects to release Laagland, the Dutch translation by Auke Leistra, in spring 2009, coinciding with O’Neill’s stay in the Amsterdam as part of the writers-in-residence program.
During his stay Joseph O’Neill was interviewed by NRC Handelsblad and the VPRO Gids and on television - at Pauw & Witteman and VPRO’s Boeken.
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