Hugh Leonard, pseudonym of John Keyes Byrne Biography

Irish playwright, born in Dublin, educated at Presentation College, Dun Laoghaire. He worked as a civil servant before becoming a prolific dramatist and, in later years, programme director for the Dublin Theatre Festival. Among the work that followed his first play, The Big Birthday (1956), was The Poker Session (1964), The Au Pair Man (1968), The Patrick Pearse Motel (1971), and Da (1973), a striking exploration of a young man's ambiguous feelings for his dead father. Leonard has also written a great deal of original drama, and adapted several novels, for television, and produced two volumes of autobiography, Home before Night (1979) and Out after Dark (1988).