User:Ben Marnell/sandbox

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Career
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Mary Becketts Career began as a Primary school teacher in Belfast in the years 1945-56. With some overlap her writing career began in the 1950s when she wrote a number of short plays for BBC Radio and also published several short stories such as “The Weaker Sex”. She was also featured as the only women in a symposium called “the Young writer” in a Dublin literary magazine called "the Bell” in 1951 which included her short story “A Farm of Land”. Becketts focus on northern Irish culture at the time is particularly prominent in some of her early short stories such as “Excursion” which won a BBC short stories competition when it was published in 1949 also “The Master of Bombs” and “Theresa” Both featured in "the Bell” in 1953 all 3 of which give a strong insight into how being a woman at this time in Belfast impacted a person’s daily life. Another of her short stories “Three dreams cross” was featured in a special edition of “Irish Writing” which was dedicated Irish female writers in 1954 and was actually the first journal in Ireland to include only female writers. Her next publication came in 1980 when she published her now title piece “A Belfast Women”. Her next piece was a novel called “Give Them Stones” published in 1987, the piece is often read as a representative work of what things where like during The Troubles specifically from the point of view of a woman. In that same year (1987) she received a Sunday tribune arts award and then in 1988 she was shortlisted for the Hughes Fiction award. She later wrote a second collection of short stories, published in 1990 titled “A Literary Women.” The collection had 10 short stories all connected by characters, themes and plot lines. Beckett also published a Series of children’s books first “Orla was six” in 1989 followed by the sequel “Orla at school” in 1991 and also including "Hannah, or the Pink Balloons" and "A Family Tree".

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