Michael McLaverty


Michael McLaverty was an Irish writer of novels and short stories.

Background

Michael McLaverty was born in Carrickmacross, County Monaghan, to Michael McLaverty and Kathleen Brady. A few years later the family moved to the Beechmount area of Belfast. He went to St Gall's, and later attended St Malachy's College and Queen's University Belfast, earning his BSc in 1927 and his MSc in 1933 for a thesis, "Earlier Work on the Passage of Electricity through Gases".
For a short period McLaverty lived on Rathlin Island, off the County Antrim coast, where he gained much of the inspiration for his short stories. Upon marrying, he moved to Deramore Drive, Malone, Belfast. In 1928, he had got a Diploma in Education at St Mary's Teacher Training College in London. He worked as a teacher of maths and physics in Belfast for 35 years, firstly at St John's Primary School and then at St Thomas Secondary School.
Joe Graham in his book, Belfast Born Bred And Buttered speaks fondly of having been taught by McLaverty both at St John's and St Thomas's schools. During McLaverty's tenure at the latter, poet Seamus Heaney was one of his staff. Heaney recalled McLaverty's enthusiasm for teaching but also for literature, and McLaverty introduced him to the work of Patrick Kavanagh.

Writing

McLaverty was one of Ireland's distinguished short story writers, painting with spare intensity the northern landscape of his homeland, the hill farms, rough island terrain and the backstreets of Belfast. He focuses on moments of passion, wonder or bitter disenchantment in lives of struggle. His collected works are illustrated with woodcuts by Barbara Childs, and including an introduction by Seamus Heaney and a foreword by Sophia Hillan,
Heaney summarised McLaverty's contribution: "His voice was modestly pitched, he never sought the limelight, yet for all that, his place in our literature is secure." In the introduction to McLaverty's Collected Works, Heaney describes the writing: "His tact and pacing, in the individual sentence and the overall story, are beautiful: in his best work, the elegiac is bodied forth in perfectly pondered images and rhythms". Heaney's poem Fosterage, in the sequence Singing School from North is dedicated to him.

Collected works