Jack Holland (writer)

Jack Holland (June 4, 1947 – May 14, 2004) was an Irish journalist, novelist, and poet who built a reputation chronicling "The Troubles" in his native Northern Ireland. He published articles, short stories, four novels, and seven works of non-fiction, mostly dealing with the politics and cultural life of Northern Ireland. His last book, Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice, was something of a departure from his usual writings, and its original publisher abandoned the finished manuscript shortly after Holland's death, which followed a brief struggle with cancer. However, the book was later published posthumously by a different publisher.

Born in post-war Belfast to a working-class family, Jack spent his first five years living with his extended family in a home above Dougall's Yard on May Street, where his paternal grandfather, William Henry Holland, a veteran who was wounded in the Battle of the Somme, was the stable keeper. Since his paternal grandmother, Mary Murphy Holland, was a Catholic and his grandfather a Protestant, he was raised in a "mixed" Catholic/Protestant household.

He attended St. Thomas' Secondary Intermediate School where the headmaster was the writer Michael MacLaverty and his English teacher Seamus Heaney. The first in his family to graduate from university, Holland studied at the University of Ulster's Magee College and Trinity College, Dublin. He then earned a master's degree in theoretical linguistics at Essex University in England.

His journalistic career began at the Dublin weekly Hibernia, a newspaper owned by John Mulcahy and edited by Brian Trench. He worked briefly for the BBC Northern Ireland, where he was a researcher for the weekly news program Spotlight, working alongside Jeremy Paxman and other journalists.

In 1977, he moved to New York City with his American wife—Mary Hudson, a teacher and translator—and their daughter, Jenny Holland. He earned his living there as a freelance journalist, writing for many publications, most notably The Irish Echo, where his weekly column "A View North" had a devoted following. In the 1990s, he became a lecturer at the New York University School of Journalism, he worked for Channel 4 in London, and he co-scripted the documentary Daughters of the Troubles (produced by Marcia Rock). His knowledge of the Northern Irish political situation and his reporting of the terrorist conflict earned him the respect of the public and of influential policy-makers in Washington, London, and Dublin.

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