James Joyce

James Joyce was an Irish writer, born in Dublin in 1882, regarded as one of the most influential authors of the 20th century for his radical experimentation with language and narrative form. He is best known for the novel Ulysses, the short story collection Dubliners, the autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and the dense, dream-like Finnegans Wake.

Joyce spent most of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe, in cities including Trieste, Zurich and Paris, writing obsessively about the Dublin he had left behind. His technique of stream-of-consciousness narration, dense wordplay, and structural ambition — most famously mapping the 18 episodes of Ulysses onto Homer's Odyssey — reshaped what fiction could do and influenced virtually every major writer who followed.

The texts featured here are not musical recordings by Joyce but spoken-word readings or adaptations drawn from his literary works — chapters of Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man — reflecting his enduring presence as raw material for performance and reinterpretation well beyond the page. Joyce died in Zürich in 1941.