Jennifer Johnston

1930–2025

Irish novelist and playwright, born in Dublin to the actress and director Shelah Richards and the playwright Denis Johnston. She studied at Trinity College Dublin, and much of her fiction examines the decline of the Protestant Anglo-Irish class in the twentieth century. Her first novel, The Captains and the Kings (1972), won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award, and The Old Jest won a Whitbread award in 1979. She was a member of Aosdána. She died in February 2025. Shadows on our Skin, set in Derry during the Troubles, was shortlisted for the 1977 Booker Prize.

Timeline of Jennifer Johnston’s life

Works

Prizes