John Boyne was born on April 30, 1971 in Ireland. He earned his undergraduate degree in English Literature from Trinity College in Dublin, and later attended the University of East Anglia in Norwich for his Masters degree in creative writing.
Although Boyne has not yet written a novel set in his home country, he has said in multiple interviews that he strongly identifies as an Irish writer. He cites two of his strongest influences as Charles Dickens and John Irving. Boyne has published about seventy short stories, including most of his earliest works. His first story, "The Entertainments Jar," was published in The Sunday Tribune when Boyne was just twenty-one years old. In 2007, he challenged himself to write a series of fifty "short short stories," one per week, for The Sunday Tribune. Each story was just 500 words long.
In 2000, he published his first novel, The Thief of Time. Since then, he has published seven more adult novels, including Crippen (2004), which some critics found to be misogynistic. This criticism bothered Boyne, who took care to create deeper female characters in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
In addition to The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which was his first young adult novel, Boyne has published three other books for young readers: Noah Barleywater Runs Away (2010), The Terrible Thing That Happened to Barnaby Brocket (2012), and Stay Where You Are and Then Leave (2013).
Boyne was inducted into the Hennessy Literary Awards Hall of Fame in 2012.
The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, published in the United Kingdom with the alternate spelling The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, won many international and Irish awards, including two Irish Book Awards and the Bisto Book of the Year. It topped the New...
