Thomas Kilroy’s plays include The Death and Resurrection of Mr. Roche (1968), The O’Neill (1969), Talbot’s Box (1977), Double Cross (1986), The Secret Fall of Constance Wilde (1997) and The Shape of Metal (2003). Kilroy was a board member of The Field Day Theatre Company, founded by Brian Friel and Stephen Rea in Derry in 1980.

His novel The Big Chapel was shortlisted for the 1971 Booker Prize and won the Guardian Fiction Prize and the Heinemann Award for Literature in the same year. Kilroy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1972 and an honorary Fellow of TCD in 2011. He is Professor Emeritus of Modern English at NUI Galway.