Journalist, author and playwright Paul Howard will be the guest speaker at the Marketing Society’s annual Christmas Lunch which takes place in the Shelbourne Hotel on December 6th.
Best known for his Ross O’Carroll-Kelly series of books, which have sold over 1.5m copies, he is also an accomplished playwright while his weekly column in the Irish Times earned him NewsBrands Columnist of the Year award in 2013.
His first non-Ross-related venture into fiction: Triggs – The Autobiography of Roy Keane’s Dog – was a bestseller in 2012 and short-listed for an Irish Book Award (IBA). He is a record four-time IBA winner, collecting the best popular fiction prize in 2007 for Should Have Got Off at Sydney Parade, The Oh My God Delusion and Downturn Abbey.
He then won the non-fiction book of the year in 2016 for Tara Browne’s biography, I Read the News Today, Oh Boy. He has written comedy for radio and TV and was involved in the series of two RTÉ comedy sketch shows, Irish Pictorial Weekly and the Mario Rosenstock Show. He was twice nominated for an Irish Film & Television Award (IFTA).
His non-fiction books include The Joy, an account of life in Mountjoy Prison, The Gaffers: Mick McCarthy, Roy Keane and the Team They Built, detailing the McCarthy-Keane clash in Saipan before the 2002 World Cup. He also ghost-wrote the autobiographies of boxer Steve Collins (Celtic Warrior) and broadcaster George Hook’s Time Added On.
In September of this year, he was the subject of an hour-long RTÉ documentary called We Need to Talk About Ross, produced by Adrian McCarthy of Wildfire Films. He has also co-written a children’s book with former rugby player Gordon D’Arcy called Gordon’s Game.
