Samuel Beckett

An Irish playwright, novelist and poet, born Samuel Barclay Beckett in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock, and one of the last modernist writers, considered a key figure of what critic Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. Beckett settled in Paris, and before the Second World War worked as a secretary and research assistant to James Joyce, contributing research toward the book that became Finnegans Wake. His plays and novels, including Waiting for Godot (1952), Endgame (1957), Molloy (1951) and Malone Dies (1951), strip away conventional plot and character to dramatize absurdity, waiting and the limits of language. He was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature and died in Paris on 22 December 1989.