The Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland raised as an Anglican, Beckett later became agnostic, a perspective which informed his writing.īeckett's residence at Trinity College Dublin, pictured in 2021īeckett's family home, Cooldrinagh, was a large house and garden complete with tennis court built in 1903 by Beckett's father. At the age of five, he attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School near Harcourt Street in Dublin. Beckett had one older brother named Frank Edward (1902–1954). His parents were both 35 when he was born, and had married in 1901. Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on 13 April 1906, the son of William Frank Beckett (1871–1933), a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe, a nurse. He was the first person to be elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. In 1961 he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature 'for his writing, which-in new forms for the novel and drama-in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation'. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH ( Réseau Gloria) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949. Ī resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English.

He is considered one of the last modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense. Samuel Barclay Beckett ( / ˈ b ɛ k ɪ t/ 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator.

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