Traces in Dublin
Hugo Hamilton, an Author with Special German Irish Roots

Hugo Hamilton is an Irish-born author with a German mother and Irish father. His revolutionary father forbade him to speak English and refused to do so himself, even though it was his mother tongue. Due to his father’s opinions and the situation in the country, his growing up felt like an internal exile. His mother was an immigrant and his father isolated himself and the family more by only speaking German or sometimes Irish.
 
Hamilton uses his childhood experiences in his work. He has written nine novels, two memoirs, a collection of short stories, and three plays. His bestselling memoir The Speckled People (2003) deals with his German Irish heritage and growing up in Dublin in the 1950s. This memoir is not the only one of his works that explores the political situation in Ireland, emigration, and multicultural societies. Hamilton’s novel Hand in the Fire (2010) also thematises the search for a feeling of belonging, struggles within Irish society, and the issues of learning the Irish English language variety. He is also interested in the codes of language that make conversations between people from different countries difficult even if they can speak the same language. One person might not know the unwritten linguistic rules of another language, such as English the way it is spoken in Ireland.

The author has won several international prizes for his work. These include the French Prix Femina Etranger, the Italian premio Giuseppe Berto and a DAAD scholarship in Berlin.