Liam O'Flaherty served on the Western Front as a soldier in the British army's Irish Guards regiment from 1916 and was badly injured in 1917.

O'Flaherty wrote almost exclusively in English, except for a play, a notable collection of short stories and some poems in the Irish language.

O'Flaherty was born, a son of Maidhc Ó Flaithearta and Maggie Ganley, at Gort na gCapall, Inishmore.

"[2] In primary school, Liam and his brother Tom were both pupils of David O'Callaghan, a teacher who had a significant influence on the future writers.

In 1916 he joined the British Army as a member of the Irish Guards as 'William Ganly',[5] using his mother's surname, then serving on the Western Front.

He found trench life devastating and was badly injured in September 1917 during the Battle of Langemarck, near Ypres in West Flanders.

[7] In 1922, two days after the establishment of the Irish Free State, O'Flaherty, as Chairperson of the Council of the Unemployed and other unemployed Dublin workers, seized the Rotunda Concert Hall (the building was later separated from the Rotunda Hospital and is now divided between the Ambassador Cinema and the Gate Theatre) in Dublin and held it for four days flying a red flag, in protest at "the apathy of the authorities".

It was Lahr and his wife Esther who supported O’Flaherty and published some of his works for the first time, including the play Darkness and in 1931 the only recently republished A Cure for Unemployment.

He also came to the notice of Edward Garnett, chief editor in the publishing firm of Jonathan Cape, who gave encouragement to many Irish writers at the time.

Back in Dublin in 1924, O’Flaherty co-founded the Radical Club, among whose members were many progressive artists, including Harry Kernoff, and his life-long friend and leading Irish language writer, the socialist and fellow Galway man, Pádraic Ó Conaire, and was involved with the publication of the literary magazine To-Morrow (1924).

In 1925 O’Flaherty scored immediate success with his best-selling novel The Informer, which won him the 1925 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction.

His fine anti-war novel Return of the Brute (1929) is set in the World War I trenches and was published the same year as All Quiet on the Western Front.

Another text expressing O’Flaherty's deep anti-war sentiments was the short story The Discarded Soldier written at the request of his brother Tom, for the CPUSA paper The Daily Worker (27 June 1925).

O'Flaherty would later express regret about the way that the book had been misinterpreted as representing a genuine disillusionment on his part, describing the USSR in 1934 as 'that workshop...where the civilization of the future is being hammered out.

Written quite cinematically in the 1920s, when cinema was still a relatively new art form, some of O’Flaherty's novels lent themselves easily to film adaptations.

He also worked with the French director Jeff Musso in the making of other films based on his novels Mr Gilhooly and The Puritan.

The collection Dúil, published in 1953 when his writing activity was coming to an end, contained 18 short stories in Irish which he had written over many years.

[17][18] This collection, now widely admired, had a poor reception at the time and this seems to have discouraged him from proceeding with an Irish language novel he had in hand.

They printed them … I consulted Pádraic Ó Conaire and we decided that drama was the best means of starting a new literature in Irish … the two of us went to Dublin …[and] put our scheme before them [the Gaeltacht Commission] for a travelling theatre and so on.

[22] It first appeared in print in O’Flaherty's own translation into English in The New Coterie, a magazine edited by Charles Lahr and Esther Archer in the summer of 1926.

In 2020, Mícheál Ó Conghaile published a translation of thirty of O’Flaherty's English language short stories into Irish.

The first book to be banned by this Board was O'Flaherty's expressionist Galway novel The House of Gold which took to task the gombeen men who seized power in the Irish Free State following independence.

In addition, Nuascéalta republished the virtually unknown short story The Cure for Unemployment (Three Leaves of a Bitter Shamrock, 2014).