Samuel Barclay Beckett was born, "astride a grave", (his words) on the 13 May 1906 of solid bourgeois protestant stock in Dublin. Educated at Portora Royal School and Trinity College Dublin where he excelled at rugby and cricket and graduated with an M.A. degree. He went on to lecture in English at the Ècole Normale Supêrieure College in Paris (1928-30) afterwards returning to his old college, Trinity, in Dublin to lecture in French.

His love of France and Paris in particular enticed him to return in 1932 and he lived there for the rest of his life. Arriving back he soon found himself in the midst of the literary avant-garde. It was here he met another Irish exile - James Joyce - who eventually became an intimate friend and as a writer, a powerful influence. He began by writing journalistic articles, short stories, novellas and poems in French and English, but it was his novels Murphy (1938), Wait (1944) and Malone Dies (1956) that established him as a writer with unique gifts.

His first play En Attendant Godot written in 1952 as 'a relaxation from the awful prose I was writing at the time', astonished critics and audiences alike and he was persuaded to translate it into English. Peter Hall quickly realized its potential and produced it at the Arts Theatre in 1954. The rest, as they say, is history. Thereafter he wrote plays of infinite variety extending the areas of theatrical expression undreamed of by most other playwrights. Testimonies are Endgame (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1959) and the play you will see tonight, Happy Days (1961).

He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and was made a Companion of Literature in 1984: He died in Paris in 1989 at the age of 83.

Ken Ratcliffe