Paul Howard – Writer

Paul Howard is a multi-award-winning journalist, author, playwright and comedy writer. He has been described by the Irish Times as “Ireland’s pre-eminent satirist” and by the Irish Independent as “one of the world’s funniest writers”. He is best known as the creator of Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, a fictional rugby jock whose exploits have been the subject of seventeen novels, which have collectively sold more than one million copies in Ireland alone.

He is also the author of three previous Ross O’Carroll-Kelly plays, The Last Days of the Celtic Tiger in 2007, Between Foxrock and a Hard Place in 2010 and Breaking Dad in 2014, all of which enjoyed long sell-out runs and revivals in Dublin, Cork and Limerick.

He is a four-time Irish Book Award winner, collecting the Best Popular Fiction prize for Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade in 2007, The Oh My God Delusion in 2010, and Downturn Abbey in 2013. The seventeenth book in the series, Operation Trumpsformation, was published in September 2017 by Penguin Ireland.

In 2013, he was named Columnist of the Year for his weekly satirical column in the Irish Times.

In 2012, he wrote the book and lyrics for Anglo the Musical, a puppet-based, comedy musical about the collapse of Ireland’s banks. His satirical football memoir, Triggs – The Autobiography of Roy Keane’s Dog, was a number one bestseller in 2012 and was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award.

He has written comedy for radio and television and was one of the main sketch writers on the twice IFTA-nominated satirical TV show Irish Pictorial Weekly, in which he appeared as David Drumm and Peter Darragh Quinn. He has also written sketches for The Mario Rosenstock Show. In 2014, he was commissioned by US network E! to write a pilot for a sitcom he devised called The Cliterati.

Before he embarked on a career as a comedy writer, he was one of Ireland’s most respected sports journalists, working mostly for The Sunday Tribune, covering World Cups, Olympic Games and numerous other major sporting events. He was named Irish Sports Journalist of the Year in the 1998 for an investigation into eating disorders among Irish athletes and an interview with the disgraced former sprinter, Ben Johnson. He was also shortlisted for the award in 2002, 2003, and 2004.

In October 2016, his biography of Tara Browne, the Irish-born Guinness heir immortalised in The Beatles’ song ‘A Day in the Life’, was published by Picador. It won the Best Non-Fiction award at the 2016 Irish Book Awards and has been optioned for a movie by a major production studio.