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Career and Role in X

Paul Smith was hired by Hilton Edwards and Micheál MacLiammóir at the Gate Theatre for walk-on parts which led him to collaborate on costume designs and production with MacLiammóir. In 1951, he met Orson Welles at the theatre and went to work on several of his films such as Othello (1952) and Chimes at midnight (1965) as a costume designer, though he was never credited for it. It is around that time that he met Kate O’Brien while attending a dinner held by Edwards and MacLiammóir. Despite their age difference, the two became close friends. Later that decade, Smith moved to Sweden to work as an English teacher at Uppsala University where he began his writing career and published his first book Esther’s altar (1959). It was intended as a starkly vivid portrayal of life in Dublin's slums during the 1916 Easter Rising. Although being well-received in the United States, the novel was banned in Ireland until 1975 for its political criticism of the country.

In the 1960s, the writer moved to Canada then to the United-States undertaking different jobs such as radio actor, barman, theatre correspondent or book reviewer while continuing to write. In 1961, Paul Smith published The Countrywoman, a novel about the Dublin slums whose main character was inspired by his mother. He dedicated the novel to her causing some confusion amongst the readers as her name happened to be the same one as his dear friend Kate O’Brien. The novel was immediately banned in Ireland suffering the same fate as his previous novel. The following year, he published his third novel The Stubborn Season(1962) followed by ‘Stravaganza! in 1963. Although Smith received ongoing critical praise, he faced financial hardships which led him to go bankrupt over a lawsuit about an unpaid loan. In 1972, he published a sequel to his book The Countrywoman entitled Summer Sang in Me (or Annie in the USA) which was the last novel he ever wrote. In 1978, Paul Smith was awarded the American Irish Foundation Literary Award.