"I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use — silence, exile and cunning.”

“When the soul of man is born in this country there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets.”

"Mistakes are the portals of discovery."

James Joyce was born in Dublin, on 2 February, 1882, the eldest of ten surviving children. The family slid into poverty mainly as a result of his father’s drinking and financial mismanagement. Joyce excelled as a student at Clongowes Wood College and Belvedere College – both Jesuit schools - and later at University College Dublin studying modern languages. He drew his early inspirations from the works of Thomas Aquinas, WB Yeats and Henrik Ibsen; such was his passion for the writings of Ibsen that he learnt Norwegian so he could read the original versions of his work. After he graduated Joyce went to Paris to study medicine, but this aim was soon abandoned. He returned to Dublin in April 1903 when his mother became ill and subsequently died. He scraped a living reviewing books, teaching and singing - he was an gifted tenor.

In June 1904 he met Nora Barnacle, a chambermaid, who became his lifelong companion; they left Ireland that same year and settled in Trieste, Italy, where they spent the next ten years. Joyce wrote for an Italian newspaper Piccolo Della Sera and lectured on English literature.  Nora gave birth to their first child George in 1905 and their daughter Lucia was born in 1907.

With the outbreak of World War One the family were forced to leave Trieste and they moved to Zurich where they lived for the duration of the war. After the war, the family moved to Paris where they stayed for the next twenty years. Despite living out of Ireland for most of his adult life Joyce’s fictional universe did not extend beyond its capital city Dublin - he said: “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. In the particular is contained the universal.”

Joyce’s collection of short stories, Dubliners, ranks among the finest short story collections in world literature. It was finally published in 1914 after years of wrangling with his publishers over censorship and other difficulties. The stories are a portrait of the city’s society and hint at some of Joyce’s central themes. Each of the stories can be read in isolation but reading each as part of a whole allows their themes, concerns and meanings to overlap and reverberate. Some of these themes emerge more fully in his first novel published in 1916, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: a semi-autobiographical work in which the central character rejects family, country and church in order to pursue his artistic vocation using as his chosen weapons: “silence, exile and cunning”.

Ulysses is regarded by many as Joyce’s masterpiece. It is a modern re-telling of Homer’s epic The Odyssey set in Dublin on a single day. It revolutionized the novel with its 'stream of consciousness' technique and inventive narrative style and defined new territories that enabled the representation of human experience to move forward into the modern age. For a while it looked as though Ulysses would never be published: the novel was banned from both the United Kingdom and the United States on obscenity charges. It was published in Paris in 1922 thanks to an American ex-patriate, Sylvia Beach. It did not appear in the United States until 1933 and it was legalized in Britain two years later.

While working on Ulysses Joyce faced daunting financial and health problems. Between 1917 and 1930 he was beset with eye problems caused by glaucoma and endured many operations which sometimes resulted in periods of total blindness. Despite these problems he continued to work. To make ends meet Joyce worked as a teacher, salesman, journalist, lecturer and he returned to Ireland setting up its first dedicated cinema, the Volta Electric Theatre later renamed the Lyceum Picture Theatre.  He was helped by a series of generous grants from patrons such as Harriet Shaw Weaver and Edith Rockefeller McCormick who admired his work and sympathised with his difficulties.

             Nora, Georgio & Lucia                                                      Nora Barnacle

Joyce’s last and perhaps most challenging work Finnegans Wake was published in 1939. Partly based on Freud’s dream psychology, Joyce uses language in a new way: multi-layered, multi-lingual, replete with obscure allusions and complex puns - "this ought to keep the professors busy for a hundred years!", he declared.

Joyce and his family remained in Paris until they were forced to flee Nazi occupation - they returned to Zurich. He died following surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer on 13 January, 1941, at the age of 58, and was buried in Zurich's Fluntern Cemetery. In 1999, Time Magazine named Joyce one of the '100 Most Important People of the 20th Century' stating that "Joyce ... revolutionized 20th century fiction".  His work and life are celebrated annually on 16 June, Bloomsday, in Dublin.