Paul Murray Books in Order

Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975 and grew up in Killiney, on the city’s south side. His father taught Anglo-Irish drama at University College Dublin, and his mother had trained as a teacher. Murray was a keen reader as a child and started writing early, inventing adventures about animals in space.

He went to Blackrock College in south Dublin, where the routines, friendships, pressures, and pecking orders of school life stayed with him. Later, those memories helped shape the fictional Seabrook College in Skippy Dies. He studied English literature and philosophy at Trinity College Dublin before taking a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

The route to publication wasn’t neat. After university, Murray worked in a bank, spent time teaching English in Barcelona, and wrote a novel that was firmly rejected by an agent. While working in a Dublin bookshop, a colleague, the novelist John Boyne, suggested that he apply to the creative-writing course at East Anglia.

It proved to be a useful nudge. At the university, Murray was taught by Ali Smith, who passed his work to her publisher, and his first novel soon found a home.

An Evening of Long Goodbyes, published in 2003, introduces Charles Hythloday, a pampered young man watching his family’s old way of life collapse around him. Set between an inherited estate and modern Dublin, it combines farce, money trouble, old movies, and the uncomfortable business of growing up. The novel was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

His next novel, Skippy Dies, arrived in 2010 and moved into the crowded world of a Dublin boys’ school. Its large cast includes teenagers, teachers, parents, and a brilliant but isolated student trying to make sense of the universe. The book is funny in places and painful in others, with adolescent friendship, grief, bullying, first love, and adult failure all tangled together. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Murray turned his attention to post-crash Dublin in The Mark and the Void in 2015. The novel follows Claude, a lonely French banker, and Paul, a novelist with plans that are not nearly as harmless as they first appear. It uses a banking world full of jargon, schemes, and false confidence to tell a very human story about loneliness, ambition, and the stories people tell themselves. It shared the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction.

Then came The Bee Sting in 2023, a wide-ranging family story about the Barneses as business troubles, old secrets, and private fears begin closing in. The novel moves among parents Dickie and Imelda and their children, Cass and PJ, while looking closely at money, marriage, friendship, climate anxiety, and the damage caused by things left unsaid. It won the An Post Irish Book of the Year and the Nero Gold Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.

Across his fiction, Murray returns to people caught between private dreams and the systems around them, whether that system is a school, a bank, a family, or a changing Ireland. He also wrote the screenplay for the film Metal Heart. He lives in Dublin with his wife and son.