History

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'An excellent book. ... [Bobby is] alive and vibrant on every page. Most importantly, the book traces the development of an ordinary boy from a working class background to the highly politicised, articulate revolutionary that he became in later years.'
Dr Laurence McKeown, author, playwright and former IRA prisoner who joined the hunger strike led by Bobby Sands

'An excellent book. It tells not just the story of Bobby, the prison protest and hunger strikes but accurately captures the atmosphere of the prison....Bobby is alive and vibrant on every page."


'The life of a truly remarkable young man ... how he grew from a plucky lad into a deeply committed, sensitive, anti-imperialist revolutionary. [This book] has a message that will find interest everywhere.'
Mumia Abu-Jamal

'Denis O'Hearn in his gripping, heart stopping, exhilarating sometimes sad book, Bobby Sands, tells an extraordinary story of life, love and noble death. ... A grand and inspiring book by a grand and inspiring writer.'
Malachy McCourt

'Bobby Sands, as this magnificent biography reminds us, was a hero for the whole world and yet broad Belfast to the core. We cried when he died, but he laughed in the face of tyranny and taught us the deepest meaning of comradeship.' Mike Davis

At seventeen, Bobby Sands was interested in music, girls and soccer. Ten years later, he led his fellow prisoners on a protest that grabbed the world's attention. Bobby Sands turned twenty-seven on hunger strike, after spending almost nine years in prison because of his activities as a member of the Irish Republican Army. When he died on May 5, 1981, on the sixty-sixth day of his hunger strike against repressive conditions in Northern Ireland's H-Block prisons, parliaments across the world stopped for a minute's silence in his honour. Nelson Mandela followed his example and led a similar hunger strike in South Africa. Bobby Sands' remarkable life and death have made him the Irish Che Guevara. He is an enduring figure of resistance whose life has inspired millions around the world. But until the publication of this book, nothing has adequately explored the motivation of the hunger strikers, nor recreated this period of history from within the prison cell. Denis O'Hearn's powerful biography, which contains an enormous amount of new material based on primary research and interviews, illuminates for the first time this enigmatic, controversial and heroic figure.

About The Author

Denis O'Hearn was born in New Mexico and is of Irish and Native Alaskan (Aleut) ancestry. He moved to Belfast in the 1970s, where he was a student and a journalist. His articles for In These Times and the Guardian introduced the Irish 'H-Blocks' prison conflict to the broad audience of progressives in the US. Since the mid-1990s he has taught at Queens University in Belfast, where he is professor of social and economic change. He was a Fulbright Scholar at University College Dublin in 1991-92 and, jointly with his work at Queens, he is now professor of sociology at the University of Binghamton in New York. He lives in Belfast.

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