Ireland has a long and rich tradition of writing. Some of our most important writers include: W.B.Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett and Seamus Heaney, each one a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.

But that's not all there is. Ireland has produced even more world famous writers and literary names such as James Joyce, Flann O'Brien, Oscar Wilde and Jonathan Swift. Who hasn't heard of Ulysses by James Joyce or Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift?

Ireland is home to the oldest vernacular literature in Europe. When George Thomson, the great scholar of ancient Greece, went looking for a culture and a literature to match that of Homer, he found it in the writings of the Blasket Islands. A remote and desolate set of islands off the south west coast of Ireland, where they developed their own distinct literature in the first half of the twentieth century.

The great tradition of poetry in Irish still lives on today. Some of Ireland's present-day poets still actually write in Irish.