Brendan John Sweeney

Raised in County Cavan, by an Irish-speaking father from Donegal and a Scottish mother, Brendan Sweeney has always felt slightly out of place.After studying journalism at Rathmines, and a spell working as a feature writer for the now-defunct Sunday Press and other Irish publications, Brendan headed for the Continent where he wandered between countries as diverse as Spain, Germany, Denmark and Norway picking up languages and generally refusing to settle down. En route he taught English to the Spanish Olympic team, washed dishes in Tivoli Gardens, Copenhagen, worked as a news presenter for Deutsche Welle in Cologne, and ran human rights projects for a Danish organisation in Yemen and Iraq.In the meantime he wrote a wide range of articles on subjects as diverse as violence in Danish supermarkets and the influence of Celtic myths on Scandinavian literature. Brendan’s first fictional work Once In Another World was inspired by his MA dissertation at the University of Copenhagen on the topic of IRA films, and by his abiding interest in myth, nationalism and the roots of political violence.