1923: Entered Trinity College, Dublin, where he studied modern languages (French and Italian).

1926: Moved to Paris, where he met James Joyce (in 1928) who would become a close personal friend; wrote an essay on the early stages of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Rejecting the advances of Joyce's daughter, he commented that he was dead and had no feelings that were human.

1930: Won his first literary prize for his poem Whoroscope which deals with the ideas of the philosopher Descartes on the subject of time and the transience of life. After writing a study of Marcel Proust (author of Remembrance of Things Past, 1922-1931), he concluded that habit and routine were the "cancer of time".

1932: Left his post at Trinity College and travelled; a period of wanderings in Germany, France, England, and Ireland. Beckett wrote his first novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women,which traces these journeys.

1938: Nearly killed when he was stabbed by a "pimp". In the hospital, he was visited by Suzanne Deschevaux-Dusmesnil who would become his wife. He published the novel, Murphy.

1941: When Paris was invaded in the Second World War, Beckett and his wife joined the Resistance against the Germans. They were forced to flee when their cell was betrayed, leaving their apartment only hours before the Gestapo arrived. He was later awarded the "Croix de Guerre" for his work with the Resistance. After the war Beckett began to write primarily in French.

1953: Waiting for Godot premiered in Paris on 5 January. Although critics labelled the play "the strange little play in which 'nothing happens'", it became an instant success, enjoying the critical praise of dramatists such as Tennessee Williams and Jean Anouilh. Commenting on the play, Anouilh stated, “It will make it easier for me and everyone else to write freely in the theatre.”

1957: Secured his position as a dramatist when his second masterpiece, Endgame, premiered in French at the Royal Court Theatre in London.

1969: Awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

1986: Began to suffer from emphysema and wrote in bed his final work, the poem What is the Word. He remarked that each word seemed to him "an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness".

1989: Died on 22 December and was buried in Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris. When asked on his deathbed what he found valuable in life, he responded, ”Precious little".

Compiled by Roger Beaumont