Tomas O'Crohan was born on the Great Blasket Island in 1865 and died there in 1937, a great master of his native Irish. He shared to the full the perilous life of a primitive community, yet possessed a shrewd and humorous detachment that enabled him to observe and describe the world. His book is a valuable description of a now vanished way of life; his sole purpose in writing it was in his own words, 'to set down the character of the people about me so that some record of us might live after us, for the like of us will never be again'.
The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.

This superb account of life on the Great Blasket Island off the west coast of Kerry, written as the nineteenth century draws to its close and the dawn of a new era trespasses on the lives of its small community, is both a shocking and captivating read.

Here is the first complete translation of Tomas O'Crohan's autobiography An tOileanach, first published in 1929. This edition is based on Professor Sean O Coileain's definitive 2002 Irish language edition. It contains many passages omitted from the previous English language translation by Robin Flower from the 1930s, some of which were thought too earthy for the times.

Tomas O'Crohan, a fisherman who, at around the age of forty, has taught himself to read and write in his own native tongue, depicts in unaffected, vivid language a very unforgiving landscape of human experience. The Islander reflects life as it was on the Blaskets, raw, real and extremely challenging.

The island of the Great Blasket and its remote fishing community lies three miles of the Kerry coast of Ireland, at the westernmost tip of Europe. Virtually unknown before this century, it is now famous throughout the world as the source of a rich and unique flowering of literature, a tradition as old as the Gaelic language itself. Now again available, these seven volumes--all translated from the original Gaelic--offer engaging accounts of a now-vanished lifestyle, a group of stories that will charm readers of Irish literature, those moved by a nostagia for "simpler times," and anyone who enjoys a good tale well told.
Originally published in 1928, this was the first book to come out of the Blasket Islands. In these pages from his diary, O'Crohan jotted down snatches of conversation, anecdotes, descriptions of the landscape and the sea. These unadorned, yet vivid sketches capture and preserve the essence of a way of life which was rapidly receding into the past even as he wrote.