Frank O'Connor letters donated to UCC 50 years after writer's death

For the 50th anniversary of short-writer, Frank O’Connor’s death, his son is donating private correspondence to UCC, writes Colette Sheridan

AS PART of the celebrations of the 50th anniversary of the death of Cork writer Frank O’Connor (born Michael Francis O’Donovan), on Thursday, his son, Oliver O’Donovan, will donate 642 letters to UCC library.

These letters were correspondence by his father and mother to each other between 1945 and 1950. A theologian and Church of England priest, O’Donovan’s mother was writer, Joan Knapes, who became O’Connor’s lover in 1943. While the couple never married, they lived as man and wife, in Dublin, from 1950 to 1953, when they broke up.