"
Frank Delaney is an award-winning broadcaster, freelance
journalist and writer. His series on the English language, 'Word of
Mouth', is one of the highest-rated non-news programmes on BBC
radio. For many years he presented 'The Book Show' on the Sky News
satellite channel.
After an early career in banking, Delaney, who was born in the
South of Ireland, became a newscaster with RTE in Dublin in the
early 1960s. He joined the BBC as a Reporter/Correspondent in
Dublin at a time when the current 'Troubles' were at their highest
north and south of the Irish Border. From there - having broadcast
day in, day out, reporting bombs, armed robberies, death sentences,
and kidnappings - he went on to become, according to The Times 'one
of the best loved broadcasters in Britain.'
This came about through the award-winning BBC radio programme
Bookshelf, which Delaney inaugurated in 1978. Over the next five
and a half years, he interviewed some fourteen hundred authors
across every sub-spectrum including Burgess, Updike, Attwood,
Isherwood and Stephen King. He also produced 'specials' on James
Joyce, Robert Graves, Hemingway in Paris, and the Shakespeare
Industry. At the same time Delaney made several arts documentaries
for BBC television, and for some years ran a Dick Cavett-style
late-night television show (called Frank Delaney ) whose interviews
included such literary celebrities as Borges, Burgess, Stoppard,
Theroux and many others.
As Literature Director of the Edinburgh Festival in 1980,
Delaney gave the city a feast of writers talking about their work
including Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal, Scott Berg and Richard
Ellmann. To a packed house Delaney brought together for the first
and only time Elizabeth Smart and George Baker, the protagonist
lovers of 'By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept'.
During that period, as well as giving platform performances at
the National Theatre, Delaney put into place the first of his own
writing plans when he published, for the birth centenary in 1982,
'James Joyce's Odyssey - A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses'. Other
works of non-fiction followed including 'The Celts' - a bestselling
companion volume to the controversial television series which he
also wrote and broadcast for the BBC - 'A Walk in the Dark Ages',
in which he traced the putative journey of an Irish monk through
7th century Europe and in 1993, 'A Walk to the Western Isles' which
retraces the 1773 journey of Dr Samuel Johnson to the west of
Scotland.
Frank Delaney has also written several works of fiction
including a novella 'My Dark Rosaleen', a compelling psychological
thriller 'The Amethysts' which explores the relationship between
power and personal evil and three volumes in a quintet of novels
set in twentieth century
"