James Augustine Aloysius Joyce

James Joyce (1882–1941), educated by the Jesuits at Clongowes Wood and University College Dublin, chose self-imposed exile in 1904, living across Trieste, Paris, and Zurich with his lifelong partner Nora Barnacle. Yet throughout four decades abroad, Joyce famously remarked: 'For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world.'

After publishing the short story collection Dubliners (featuring 'The Dead') and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce completed Ulysses. Published in Paris on his 40th birthday in 1922 by Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company, the novel parallelled Homer's Odyssey across eighteen distinct literary styles and radical stream-of-consciousness interior monologues. Banned in Britain and America for obscenity until a historic 1933 federal court ruling, Joyce's work is celebrated annually across the globe on June 16 as Bloomsday.