Jack Holland

Jack Holland (4 June 1947 – 14 May 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. Early life 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 McLaverty 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.