Hugo Hamilton Biography

Irish novelist, born in Dublin. His father was Irish and his mother German, and he worked as a journalist in Germany and Austria during the late 1970s before returning to Dublin. Hamilton is one of a growing number of contemporary Irish writers who are orientated towards more international themes and settings. Three of his short stories were included in Faber's First Fictions (1989). His first novel, Surrogate City (1990), set in Berlin before the fall of the Wall, was followed by The Last Shot (1991), whose action occurs towards the end of the Second World War in what was to become Czechoslovakia. The Love Test (1995) focuses on the marriage breakdown of an affluent young German couple after the re-unification of Germany, in which personal and political factors become inextricably interwoven in the husband's affair with a young East German woman who has been a victim of the security police.