Joyce spent his adult life in voluntary exile from Ireland yet wrote obsessively about Dublin. Ulysses — a single day in the life of Leopold Bloom, mapped onto Homer's Odyssey — is the supreme monument of literary Modernism, shattered English prose beyond recognition, and was banned as obscene for a decade. Finnegans Wake, his final work, remains the most difficult and debated novel in the English language.

• Nationality: IE
• Roles: writer