Ó Tuairisc, Eoghan (Eugene Rutherford Watters) (1919-1982), poet and novelist. Born in Ballinasloe, Co. Galway, the son of a shoemaker, and educated at Garbally College, Ballinasloe, and St Patrick's College, Drumcondra, he worked as a teacher in Dublin, 1940-69. He edited Feasta, 1963-6. His first novel, Murder in Three Moves (1960), is a thriller set in Galway. L'Attaque (1962), a novel about the United Irishmen's Rebellion of 1798, was followed in 1964 by the publication of his long poem The Week-End of Dermot and Grace and the collection Lux Aeterna, which contains ‘Aifreann na Marbh’, his poetic Mass for the Hiroshima victims. In 1965 his first wife, the artist Una McDonnell, died suddenly while he was working on Dé Luain (1966), a novel about the 1916 Easter Rising. Ó Tuairisc left Dublin and over the next five years produced little more than a series of intensely personal lyrics, later published as New Passages (1973). In 1969 he moved to the Wicklow/Carlow border where he began to write again. In 1972 he married the writer Rita Kelly. The major works of this later period were An Lomnochtán (1977), an autobiographical novel; Dialann sa Díseart (1981), a joint poetry collection with Rita Kelly; and the play Fornocht do Chonac (1981).
Bibliography
Máirín Nic Eoin, Eoghan Ó Tuairisc: Beatha agus Saothar (1988).
