Eimar O’Duffy 
King Goshawk and the Birds 

Originally published in 1926,
King Goshawk and the Birds is the first installment of O’Duffy’s Cuanduine trilogy, which also included
The Spacious Adventures of the Man in the Street (1928) and
Asses in Clover (1933). Set in a future world devastated by the development of capitalism,
King Goshawk concerns the eponymous tyrant’s attempt to buy all of the wildflowers and songbirds in Ireland, and the attempt by a Dublin philosopher as well as a number of mythical heroes of Irish tradition to stop him.

About the author

Eimar Ultan O’Duffy (1893-1935) was born in Dublin. Both a participant in and, beginning with the publication of his first novel in 1919, a critic of the Irish nationalist movement in the first decades of the twentieth century, O’Duffy devoted much of his prolific fiction writing to the satirizing of modern Irish culture.