Maurice Leitch

Maurice Leitch was born in 1933 and grew up in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. He worked as a teacher before joining the BBC as a producer in 1960. In 1970 he moved to London to produce radio drama for the BBC and became editor of A Book at Bedtime on Radio Four in 1977. His first novel, The Liberty Lad, was published in 1965 and he was awarded the Guardian Fiction Prize in 1968 for Poor Lazarus. Maurice Leitch won the Whitbread Prize in 1981 for Silver’s City.

In addition, he has written over twenty television and radio plays and is a winner of the Golden Harp Award. In 1999 Maurice Leitch was awarded an MBE for services to literature.

“A writer of power and originality.” – Derek Mahon, Vogue

“He has only the steady eye, the good writing, the fine fiction, the inescapable humanism of the novelist.” – Robert McLiam Wilson, Fortnight

“Perhaps the finest Irish novelist of his generation.” – Robert McLiam Wilson

Gone to Earth
A civil war leaves behind many secrets. On the Torremolinos coast survivors of Spain’s Civil War and foreigners with reasons of their own to fear the past gather in the Hotel Miramar to drink and forget. The American singer, Johnnie Ray, tries to ignore his fading fame, having fought for Franco, Eugene Furlong cannot return to Ireland.

Both men find themselves involved in the life of Adriana, a local woman, who has her own secret from the Civil War. However, Franco’s police are hunting the ghosts who remain hidden in this “doomed, damnable country of theirs.” Maurice Leitch’s novels have always stunningly evoked a period and place, Gone to Earth is a moving portrayal of Spain in the 1950s and the life of a defeated people under Franco.

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Silver's City
Silver Steele, the folk-hero who fired the first shot of the Troubles, escapes from a prison cell into a city where he is remembered only in graffiti and finds a world where he is a symbol of a cause he no longer belongs to. Silver’s City introduced a new authenticity to the literature of Northern Ireland and is one of the seminal fictional portraits of the Troubles.
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