Darach Ó Séaghdha (; born 5 November 1977) is an Irish writer,

podcast A podcast is a program made available in digital format for download over the Internet. For example, an episodic series of digital audio or video files that a user can download to a personal device to listen to at a time of their choosing ...

er and

Irish language Irish ( Standard Irish: ), also known as Gaelic, is a Goidelic language of the Insular Celtic branch of the Celtic language family, which is a part of the Indo-European language family. Irish is indigenous to the island of Ireland and was ...

activist. He is the author of ''Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language'', which won 'Ireland AM Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year' in the 2017

Irish Book Awards The Irish Book Awards are Irish literary awards given annually to books and authors in various categories. In 2018 An Post took over sponsorship of the awards from Bord Gais Energy. It is the only literary award supported by all-Irish bookstores. ...

Biography

Ó Séaghdha grew up in

Rathfarnham Rathfarnham () is a Southside suburb of Dublin, Ireland. It is south of Terenure, east of Templeogue, and is in the postal districts of Dublin 14 and 16. It is within the administrative areas of both Dún Laoghaire–Rathdown County Council a ...

, a suburb of

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

, in a multi-lingual household. His father, a linguist, and mother used to speak Irish together but spoke English to their children. When Ó Séaghdha's father became very ill, Ó Séaghdha became interested in learning Irish and used Twitter to share interesting Irish phrases and words he came across. Ó Séaghdha describes Irish as "the amazing buried treasure". In his writing he wants to show people how they, through Irish, can make sense of the world around them, through words and phrases that do not exist in the English language. In the 2017 Irish Book Awards, his book ''Motherfoclóir: Dispatches from a Not So Dead Language'' (Head of Zeus, 2017) won the award for Ireland AM Popular Non-Fiction Book of the Year. The follow-up to ''Motherfoclóir'', published in 2018, which carries the name '' Baby: Dispatches from a Rising Language'', explores the very new and very old parts of the Irish language from a personal perspective, covering the topics multilingualism,

Brehon Law Early Irish law, historically referred to as (English: Freeman-ism) or (English: Law of Freemen), also called Brehon law, comprised the statutes which governed everyday life in Early Medieval Ireland. They were partially eclipsed by the Norma ...

, and especially lexicon. He runs the popular Irish-language-trivia

Twitter Twitter is an online social media and social networking service owned and operated by American company Twitter, Inc., on which users post and interact with 280-character-long messages known as "tweets". Registered users can post, like, and ...

account ''The Irish For''. He is also the main host of the podcast ''Motherfoclóir'', part of the Headstuff Podcast Network.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:OSeaghdha, Darach 21st-century Irish writers 21st-century Irish male writers Irish language activists Living people Irish-language writers 1977 births