William Wall taught English and drama at Presentation Brothers College, Cork, where he inspired Cillian Murphy to enter acting. In 1997, Wall won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award. He published his first collection of poetry in that year. His first novel, Alice Falling, a dark study of power and abuse in modern-day Ireland, appeared in 2000. He is the author of four novels, two collections of poetry and one of short stories. In 2005, This Is The Country appeared. A broad attack on politics in "Celtic Tiger" Ireland, as well as a rite of passage novel, it was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. It can be read as a satirical allegory on corruption, the link between capitalism and liberal democracy exemplified in the 'entrepreneurial' activities of minor drug dealers and gangsters, and reflected in the architecture of business-parks and sink estates. This political writing takes the form of "an insightful and robust social conscience", in the words of academic John Kenny. Dr Kenny also focused on what he saw as Wall's "baneful take on the Irish family, his fundamentally anti-idyllic mood" which has "not entirely endeared Wall to the more misty-eyed among his readers at home or abroad". The political is also in evidence in his second collection of poetry Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me. He is not a member of Aosdána, the Irish organisation for writers and artists. In 2006, his first collection of short fiction, No Paradiso, appeared. In 2017 he became the first European to win the His provocative political blog, , has increasingly featured harsh criticism of the Irish government over their handling of the economy, as well as reviews of mainly left-wing books and movies. Many of his posts are satirical He occasionally for literary journals, writes for Irish Left Review, and reviews for The Irish Times. His work has been translated into several languages. He has also appeared on the Irish-language channel TG4, such as in the programme Cogar. He was one of the Irish delegates at the European Writers Conference in Istanbul in 2010.
Critical response to his work
Described by writer Kate Atkinson as "lyrical and cruel and bold and with metaphors to die for", critics have focused on Wall's mastery of language, his gift for "linguistic compression", his "poet's gift for apposite, wry observation, dialogue and character", his "unflinching frankness" and his "laser-like... dissection of human frailties", which is counterbalanced by "the depth of feeling that Wall invests in his work". A New Yorker review of his first novel declares "Wall, who is also a poet, writes prose so charged—at once lyrical and syncopated—that it's as if Cavafy had decided to write about a violent Irish household". In a recent review, his long poem "Job in Heathrow", anthologised in The Forward Book of Poetry 2010 but originally published in The SHOp, was described as "a chilling airport dystopia". Poet Fred Johnston suggests that Wall's poetry sets out to "list the shelves of disillusion under which a thinking man can be buried". "His apocalyptic vision of the ecological demise of our planet is suffused with humility and resignation where the global catastrophe is transformed “into a universal truth / the days are shorter / today than yesterday”", according to Borbála Faragó. For Philip Coleman "Ghost Estate is a deeply political book, but it also articulates a profound interest in and engagement with questions of aesthetics and poetics".
Personal life
Wall is a longtime sufferer from Still's disease and described his efforts to circumvent the disabling effects of the disease using speech-to-text applications as "a battle between me and the software".
