Myles na gCopaleen (aka Flann O’Brien) was born Brian O’Nolan in Strabane in 1911. He began to write as a student at University College Dublin. Thereafter he worked as a civil servant. He wrote a regular tri-weekly column called The Cruiskeen Lawn for The Irish Times for twenty-five years from the early 1940s. In this he made his name as a satirist, writing originally in Irish, then more and more in English. His claim to literary fame rests mainly on two post-modernist works in English, At-Swim-Two-Birds (1939) and the posthumous The Third Policeman (1967). He died of cancer in 1966.