Friel was born in 1929 at Knockmoyle, Northern Ireland,[1] before the family moved to nearby Killyclogher, both places close to Omagh in County Tyrone.

His father was Patrick Friel, a primary school teacher and later a councillor on Londonderry Corporation, the local city council in Derry.

Between 1950 and 1960, he worked as a maths teacher in the Derry primary and intermediate school system, taking leave in 1960 to pursue a career as a writer, living off his savings.

[3][8] There are fourteen such plays: Philadelphia, Here I Come!, Crystal and Fox, The Gentle Island, Living Quarters, Faith Healer, Aristocrats,[7] Translations,[22] The Communication Cord, Dancing at Lughnasa, Wonderful Tennessee, Molly Sweeney, Give Me Your Answer Do!

These plays present an extended history of this imagined community, with Translations and The Home Place set in the nineteenth century, and Dancing at Lughnasa in the 1930s.

Friel's first radio plays were produced by Ronald Mason for the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service in 1958: A Sort of Freedom (16 January 1958) and To This Hard House (24 April 1958).

[23][24] Friel began writing short stories for The New Yorker in 1959 and subsequently published two well-received collections: The Saucer of Larks (1962) and The Gold in the Sea (1966).

Belfast's Lyric Theatre revived it in September 1963 and the BBC Northern Ireland Home Service and Radio Éireann both aired it in 1963.

Friel had a short stint as "observer" at Tyrone Guthrie's theater in early-1960s Minneapolis; he remarked on it as "enabling" in that it gave him "courage and daring to attempt things".

The latter depicted an archaeological excavation on the day before the site was turned over to a hotel developer, using Dublin's Wood Quay controversy as its contemporary point of reference.

Defying a government ban, Friel marched with members of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association against the policy of internment on 13 January 1972, an event that would become known as Bloody Sunday.

Aristocrats was the first of three plays premiered over a period of eighteen months which would come to define Friel's career as a dramatist, the others being Faith Healer (1979) and Translations (1980).

[31] Many of Friel's earlier plays had incorporated assertively avant garde techniques: splitting the main character Gar into two actors in Philadelphia, Here I Come!, portraying dead characters in "Winners" of Lovers, Freedom, and Living Quarters, a Brechtian structural alienation and choric figures in Freedom of the City, metacharacters existing in a collective unconscious Limbo in Living Quarters.

Translations was premiered in 1980 at Guildhall, Derry by the Field Day Theatre Company,[4] with Stephen Rea, Liam Neeson, and Ray MacAnally.

"[2] Despite growing fame and success, the 1980s is considered Friel's artistic "Gap" as he published so few original works for the stage: Translations in 1980, The Communication Cord in 1982, and Making History in 1988.

Privately, Friel complained both of the work required managing Field Day (granting written and live interviews, casting, arranging tours, etc.)

[4] Friel had been thinking about writing a "Lough Derg" play for several years, and his Wonderful Tennessee (less of a critical success after its premiere in 1993 when compared to other plays from this time) portrays three couples in their failed attempt to return to a pilgrimage sit to a small island off the Ballybeg coast, though they intend to return not to revive the religious rite but to celebrate the birthday of one of their members with alcohol and culinary delicacies.

The collector prepares to announce his findings at a dinner party when the existence of two "hard-core" pornographic novels based upon the writer's daughter forces all present to reassess.

A graduate researching the impact of Leoš Janáček's platonic love for Kamila Stosslova on his work playfully and passionately argues with the composer, who appears to host her at his artistic retreat more than 70 years after his death; all the while, the Alba String Quartet's players intrude on the dialogue, warm up, then perform the first two movements of Janáček's Second String Quartet in a tableau that ends the play.

[33] After a sold-out season at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, it transferred to London's West End on 25 May 2005, making its American premiere at the Guthrie Theater in September 2007.

In 1989, BBC Radio launched a "Brian Friel Season", a six-play series devoted to his work; he was the first living playwright to receive such an honour.

A conference, National Library exhibition, film screenings, pre-show talks, and the launching of a special issue of The Irish University Review devoted to the playwright ran in conjunction with the festival.

On 22 February 2006, President Mary McAleese presented Friel with a gold torc in recognition of his election to the position of Saoi by his fellow members of Aosdána.

On acceptance of the gold Torc, Friel quipped: "I knew that being made a Saoi, really getting this award, is extreme unction; it is a final anointment—Aosdana's last rites."

Only five members of Aosdána could hold this honour at the time, and Friel joined fellow Saoithe Louis le Brocquy, Benedict Kiely, Seamus Heaney and Anthony Cronin.

Although not inclined to seek publicity, Friel attended the performance amid regular seating, received a cake while the audience sang "Happy Birthday," and mingled with well-wishers afterwards.