Frank Delaney is an award-winning broadcaster, freelance journalist and writer. His series on the English language, ‘Word of Mouth’, is one of the highest-rated non-news programmes on BBC radio. For many years he presented ‘The Book Show’ on the Sky News satellite channel.
After an early career in banking, Delaney, who was born in the South of Ireland, became a newscaster with RTE in Dublin in the early 1960s. He joined the BBC as a Reporter/Correspondent in Dublin at a time when the current ‘Troubles’ were at their highest north and south of the Irish Border. From there – having broadcast day in, day out, reporting bombs, armed robberies, death sentences, and kidnappings – he went on to become, according to The Times ‘one of the best loved broadcasters in Britain.’
This came about through the award-winning BBC radio programme Bookshelf, which Delaney inaugurated in 1978. Over the next five and a half years, he interviewed some fourteen hundred authors across every sub-spectrum including Burgess, Updike, Attwood, Isherwood and Stephen King. He also produced ‘specials’ on James Joyce, Robert Graves, Hemingway in Paris, and the Shakespeare Industry. At the same time Delaney made several arts documentaries for BBC television, and for some years ran a Dick Cavett-style late-night television show (called Frank Delaney ) whose interviews included such literary celebrities as Borges, Burgess, Stoppard, Theroux and many others.
As Literature Director of the Edinburgh Festival in 1980, Delaney gave the city a feast of writers talking about their work including Anthony Burgess, Gore Vidal, Scott Berg and Richard Ellmann. To a packed house Delaney brought together for the first and only time Elizabeth Smart and George Baker, the protagonist lovers of ‘By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept’.
During that period, as well as giving platform performances at the National Theatre, Delaney put into place the first of his own writing plans when he published, for the birth centenary in 1982, ‘James Joyce’s Odyssey – A Guide to the Dublin of Ulysses’. Other works of non-fiction followed including ‘The Celts’ – a bestselling companion volume to the controversial television series which he also wrote and broadcast for the BBC – ‘A Walk in the Dark Ages’, in which he traced the putative journey of an Irish monk through 7th century Europe and in 1993, ‘A Walk to the Western Isles’ which retraces the 1773 journey of Dr Samuel Johnson to the west of Scotland.
Frank Delaney has also written several works of fiction including a novella ‘My Dark Rosaleen’, a compelling psychological thriller ‘The Amethysts’ which explores the relationship between power and personal evil and three volumes in a quintet of novels set in twentieth century
