His father was a strict nationalist who insisted that his children should speak only German or Irish, but not English, a prohibition the young Hugo resisted inwardly.

Following a year spent in Berlin on a DAAD cultural scholarship, he completed his memoir of childhood, The Speckled People (2003), which went on to achieve widespread international acclaim.

Telling the story through the eyes of his childhood self, it evoked the struggle to make sense of a bizarre 'language war' in which the child perceives going out onto the English-speaking street outside as a daily migration.

It "triumphantly avoids ... sentimental nostalgia and victim claims"，wrote Hermione Lee in The Guardian[3] "The cumulative effect is to elevate an act of scrupulous remembering into a work of art," commented James Lasdun in The New York Times.

"[6] Hamilton's 2014 novel, Every Single Minute is a fictional account of a journey to Berlin which the author undertook with his fellow writer and memoirist, Nuala O Faolain, who was dying of cancer.