By Fred Swan

The Early Years

Samuel Barclay Beckett was born on good Friday, the 13th of April 1906 near Dublin, Ireland

He lived a middle class life with his father William Beckett who was a quantity surveyor and his mother Mary Beckett who was a nurse

He once said “I had little talent for happiness”

Paris

When he was older he moved to Paris and immediately fell in love with the city

He met James Joyce, an older Irish writer.

Whoroscope

Beckett won his first prize for literacy in a library competition for a poem called Whoroscope, he won £10

Waiting for Godot Waiting for Godot was one of Beckett's

triumphs, it was nicknamed the play in which nothing happens and is about two men waiting for a man called Godot while trying to pass the time until at the end they admit that they didn't know Godot very well and that he could've walked passed them and they wouldn't have known.

Nobel prize

In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He continued to write until his death in 1989, he died of emphysema