Novels
- Hunger Strike - Reflections on the 1981 Republican Hunger Strike, edited by Danny Morrison, was published to commemorate the 25th anniversary of the hunger strike, and featured contributions, many of them specially commissioned, from well-known novelists and poets, former prisoners and activists.
- Everything in this country must by Colum McCann, published in 2006 features the novella "Hunger Strike" written from the perspective of a boy going through puberty at the same time as his uncle is in Long Kesh, taking part in a hunger strike. Asked why he had chosen to write about the hunger strike, he said "...as far as I know there has been no fictional examination of the wound that the Hunger Strikes left on all of us. Twenty years have passed, perhaps just long enough for us to begin to see this history a new light. I believe that fiction can capture the moment when the thorn enters the skin."
- The British/Irish novelist Marion Urch set her 1996 novel "Violent Shadows" (Headline Review 1996) in the year of the hunger strikes. The novel is included in many summaries of Troubles fiction including "Gangsters and Guerillas" Patrick Magee. 2001. It was also the subject of a PhD “Representing the Unnarratable -Feminist Terrorism” by Pamela Grieman (University of Southern California. 2010) An extract from the novel was shortlisted for the Irish Post short story competition in 1995. Adjudicator Patrick McCabe called it “powerful, it seems to document all the pain of Irish history in a few short pages.”
Poetry
- Vincent Buckley, 'Hunger Strike', published in Last Poems 1991.
- Award winning poet Medbh McGuckian cites Bobby Sands's hunger strike as an influence on her poetry, saying "We moved into a house and I have a lot of moving-into-a-house poems around that time; but, they're all thinking about Bobby Sands. You wouldn't know they were about Bobby Sands because I made him into a kind of icon." McGukian also says that shortly following Sands's death, she was unable to write poetry to him, but commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death with The Sands of Saint Cyprien, a poetic depiction of the Saint Cyprien concentration camp.
- In Bobby Sands desfallece en el muro, Chilean poet Carmen Berenguer draws parallels between Chile under Pinochet and Northern Ireland of 1981, adopting Sands's voice in the first person.
- In Paula Meehan's poem Hunger Strike, a female voice refers to the prisoners in H-block, speaking in the first person plural, identifying with the community's rage at the authorities refusal to relent. The persona undertakes a "personal strike", adopting first personal singular and withdrawing from life, her garden untended, as the image of the dying Sands dominates the community's awareness. Towards the end, an old woman rescues the speaker, bring her bread and butter, and chiding her for her self-imposed alienation.
- For Bobby Sands on the Eve of his Death by Michael Davitt.
I'll try to add the poems for everyone could read them asap.
Theatre
Bobby Sands, M.P. is a play written by Judy GeBauer.