Literary Dublin guide

A city that takes its writers seriously

Dublin has a relationship with its literature that goes beyond cultural pride. The city is physically mapped in its major works — Joyce reconstructed every street in Ulysses from memory while living in Trieste and Zurich, and Dubliners still disagree about which pub is the right stand-in for Joyce’s descriptions. Beckett’s plays were formed by the light and the cadences of south Dublin. Brendan Behan could not write about anywhere that was not here. Oscar Wilde’s wit is inseparable from the Georgian terraces and Protestant middle-class drawing rooms of his youth.

Walking through Dublin is walking through a literary archive that happens to also be a living city. This guide covers the key sites, the best ways to engage with the heritage, and the calendar events — particularly Bloomsday — that bring the tradition to life.

The walking tour: best starting point

The Irish literature walking tour is the most efficient way to get the full context of Dublin’s writing heritage in a single visit. The two-to-three-hour guided walk covers the sites associated with the major writers — birthplaces, schools, haunts, graves — and places them in their historical and social context.

The guide connects the literature to the city’s history: how the Protestant Ascendancy produced Wilde and Swift; how the Catholic nationalist revival shaped Yeats; how Joyce’s exile was both a rejection and a recapitulation of the city he could not leave in his mind. This context is hard to generate independently and makes the subsequent self-guided exploration much richer.

The walk departs from the city centre most days. Book in advance, particularly in summer.

James Joyce and Ulysses

Ulysses is the most thoroughly located novel in English literature: every scene is set at a specific address in Dublin on 16 June 1904. Leopold Bloom’s itinerary through the city is knowable and walkable, and parts of his route remain largely unchanged.

Key sites:

• 7 Eccles Street (Northside): Bloom’s fictional home, no longer standing (the door is in the James Joyce Centre), but the street gives a sense of the lower-middle-class north Dublin that Joyce documented.
• Davy Byrnes pub (Duke Street, off Grafton Street): where Bloom eats his Gorgonzola and burgundy. The pub describes itself in the window as “Moral Pub” in homage to the novel and has a painted ceiling and murals by Cecil Salkeld commissioned in the 1920s.
• The National Library (Kildare Street): the setting of the “Scylla and Charybdis” chapter, where Stephen Dedalus propounds his theory of Hamlet.
• Sandy mount Strand (south Dublin, on the DART): the setting of the “Proteus” chapter, Joyce’s most difficult and most beautiful.
• Glasnevin Cemetery: where Bloom attends the funeral of Paddy Dignam in the “Hades” chapter. See the Glasnevin Cemetery guide for the cemetery’s own extraordinary history.

The James Joyce Centre at 35 North Great George’s Street has maps of Bloom’s itinerary and a detailed exhibition on the novel’s composition.

Oscar Wilde: Merrion Square and the wit

Oscar Wilde was born in 1854 at 21 Westland Row and grew up at 1 Merrion Square — the house is now used by the American College Dublin. The most accessible Wilde landmark is the sculpture in Merrion Square (opposite the house): a life-size Wilde in a colourful jacket, reclining on a quartz rock with an expression of elegant amusement. The base carries quotes from his work.

Wilde was educated at Portora Royal School in Enniskillen before Trinity College Dublin, where he excelled in classics. His Dublin formation — Protestant, Anglo-Irish, caught between colonial privilege and artistic ambition — shaped the sensibility that made him both celebrated and destroyed.

W.B. Yeats: the poet and the city

Yeats was born at 5 Sandymount Avenue (a modest plaque marks it) and is buried in Drumcliffe churchyard in County Sligo, but Dublin runs through his work from first to last. He was a central figure in the Irish Literary Revival, helped found the Abbey Theatre on Lower Abbey Street (still operating), and lived for much of his adult life in Georgian townhouses in Merrion Square and Rathfarnham.

The Abbey Theatre — the national theatre of Ireland — stages Irish plays year-round and is one of the most significant cultural institutions in the country. Checking the current programme for evening performances is worthwhile for visitors who want a direct engagement with the literary culture rather than the heritage-tourism version.

Samuel Beckett: minimalism from south Dublin

Beckett was born in 1906 in Foxrock, a wealthy south Dublin suburb, and educated at Trinity College before spending most of his adult life in Paris. The Samuel Beckett Bridge over the Liffey — designed to resemble a harp laid on its side — is the most visible civic homage to him. The Bord Gáis Energy Theatre in the Docklands hosts regular Beckett productions.

Trinity College has a significant Beckett archive and his name is on the college’s Samuel Beckett Theatre, used for student and professional productions. The Trinity College area is the right place to start understanding his Dublin.

Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh

Brendan Behan — playwright, memoirist and self-described “drinker with a writing problem” — is remembered most visibly at McDaid’s pub on Harry Street (off Grafton Street), a former morgue turned literary pub. Behan’s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage emerged from the culture of the Northside streets, the IRA and the jail time that made him simultaneously celebrated and ungovernable.

Patrick Kavanagh, the County Monaghan farmer-poet who moved to Dublin, is commemorated on the Grand Canal at Baggot Street: a bronze statue of the poet sitting on a bench beside the canal he wrote about in “Lines Written on a Seat on the Grand Canal.” Canal Bank Walk is one of Dublin’s most pleasant literary pilgrimages: walk from Portobello Bridge to Baggot Street along the southern bank.

Bloomsday: 16 June

Bloomsday is the most literary day in Dublin’s calendar. On 16 June each year, the city marks the anniversary of the events of Ulysses with readings, performances, costumed walks and informal gatherings in the relevant pubs. Davy Byrnes serves Gorgonzola sandwiches and burgundy from the episode. The James Joyce Centre organises morning events at Sandymount Strand and walking tours throughout the day.

The atmosphere is festive rather than solemn — Dubliners use the occasion as an excuse for civic pride and mild eccentricity. Coming in Edwardian costume is encouraged but not required. The full programme is outlined in the Bloomsday and Joyce’s Dublin guide.

The literary pubs

Dublin’s literary pub tradition is well documented and partly mythologised. The pubs that matter:

• Davy Byrnes (Duke Street): Joyce’s “moral pub,” serving since 1889.
• McDaid’s (Harry Street): Behan, Kavanagh and the mid-century Dublin literary set.
• The Palace Bar (Fleet Street): still decorated with its original Victorian mirrors and caricatures of Irish literary figures.
• Mulligan’s (Poolbeg Street): Kavanagh’s local and a genuine 1782 pub with no tourism pretension.
• The Long Hall (South Great George’s Street): Victorian interior, gaslamp atmosphere, frequented by everyone from Behan to contemporary writers.

The literary pubs Dublin guide covers each in detail. For the full guided experience, the Dublin traditional pub walking tour covers the history of the pub culture in context.

Connecting to other Dublin guides

Literary Dublin connects to the wider city in several ways. The best Dublin walking tours covers the full range of guided options, including the literary pub crawl. The Georgian Dublin destination guide covers the built environment that shaped so many of these writers. And the 1916 Easter Rising guide gives the political context that runs through Yeats, Behan and much of 20th-century Irish literature — the revolution and its aftermath is inseparable from the writing it produced.

Swift, Sheridan and the older tradition

Before the 20th-century literary flourishing, Dublin had a robust tradition of writing in English going back to the 18th century. Jonathan Swift — born in Hoey’s Court, off Werburgh Street, in 1667 — served as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral (a short walk from Christchurch in the Liberties) and wrote Gulliver’s Travels, A Tale of a Tub and the pamphlet A Modest Proposal from the Deanery. His grave is inside St Patrick’s Cathedral, with the famous Latin epitaph he composed himself: “where savage indignation can no longer lacerate the heart.”

Richard Brinsley Sheridan, born in Dublin in 1751, wrote The Rivals and The School for Scandal before moving to London. Oliver Goldsmith, born in County Westmeath but educated in Dublin and at Trinity College, wrote The Vicar of Wakefield and She Stoops to Conquer.

The Anglo-Irish literary tradition these writers represent — Protestant, educated, writing in English for an English-speaking audience — is different from the later tradition of Joyce and Behan, which engaged more directly with Catholic nationalist Ireland and the Irish language. Both threads are woven through Dublin’s literary character.

The literary walking tour: what to look for

The Irish literature walking tour covers a two-to-three-hour circuit of the key literary sites with a guide who can answer specific questions and adapt the route to your interests. Given the density of literary associations in a small area, having a guide who knows which plaques are worth stopping at and which are mainly for photographs makes a real difference.

The most interesting moments on the walking tour tend to be the ones that surprise: the tiny street where Swift was born; the way Joyce’s carefully chosen Eccles Street address in Ulysses maps to a real building that no longer exists; the fact that Beckett and Joyce lived within a few kilometres of each other in a city they both found unbearable and couldn’t stop writing about.

For visitors who want to explore the literary sites independently, the James Joyce Centre at 35 North Great George’s Street sells maps and guides, and the Tourist Information Office on Suffolk Street has itineraries for several themed self-guided walks.

The National Library: the literary archive

The National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street (free entry, open Monday to Saturday) holds the largest collection of Irish literary manuscripts in the world: original manuscripts of Yeats poems, Joyce’s notebooks, letters between the major figures of the Literary Revival, and extensive photographic collections. The reading room used by Joyce, Yeats and others — with its circular wooden gallery and Victorian desks — is one of the most beautiful rooms in Dublin.

The National Library runs a permanent exhibition on W.B. Yeats in the ground-floor gallery, covering his poetry, his involvement in the Abbey Theatre and his complex romantic life. It is free and worth 45 minutes before or after the National Museum next door.

Visiting Dublin for the first time: what the literary city adds

For visitors who did not primarily come to Dublin for literary reasons, the writing tradition adds an unexpected dimension to the standard sightseeing. Knowing that the streets you are walking were mapped in loving detail by a writer who loved and resented the city, who left and could not stop returning in his imagination, gives the cobblestones a different texture.

Dublin at its best is a city you leave wanting to read more about. The Dublin first time guide covers the practical orientation, and how many days in Dublin helps calibrate how much time allows for the literary dimension alongside the more obvious attractions.

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