O'Grady, Desmond

Desmond O'Grady was born on December 11, 1929 in Melbourne. He was the second and last child in the family of Winifred O'Grady (nee Kearnan) and Edward O'Grady, who served in the Australian Navy . Desmond received primary and secondary education at a Catholic school in Melbourne. As a child, he was fond of athletics , tennis and cricket , won several amateur tennis tournaments. In 1953 he graduated from the Faculty of Arts, University of Melbourne . Then for two years he taught English literature and history in high school.

In 1955, O'Grady went to Italy, where he studied Italian at the University of Perugia . After graduating in Italian, he worked at the American Catholic Immigration Agency in Rome, where he interviewed refugees from Eastern Europe . In 1957 he married an Italian woman and in the same year moved to Melbourne with her, where he first worked in the Australian Immigration Department, and then began his career as a journalist. For several years he worked as a literary editor in the influential Australian magazine The Bulletin . In 1960, he starred in a cameo in the film Federico Fellini 's Sweet Life .

In 1962, with his wife and son (born in 1958), O'Grady moved to Rome, where he took up writing and journalism. His arrival in the Italian capital coincided with the beginning of the Second Vatican Council . O'Grady seized the opportunity and covered the course of the Cathedral for a number of major English-language publications. When the Catholic newspaper National Catholic Reporter was founded in the United States in 1964, O'Grady became its first correspondent in the Vatican. In subsequent years, O'Grady also covered the Vatican for publications such as The Washington Post , Our Sunday Visitor, and The Tablet . O'Grady has also regularly appeared in Australian newspapers such as the Sydney Morning Herald , The Australian, and The Age .

O'Grady is the author of 14 books: novels, storybooks and biographies. Some of his books have been translated into other languages.

• Eat from God's Hand, Chapman, London 1965; St Paul, New York 1967.
• A Long Way from Home. Cheshire, Melbourne 1966
• Deschooling Kevin Carew, Wren, Melbourne 1974
• Valid for All Countries, UQP, Brisbane 1979
• Raffaello! Raffaello! Hale & Iremonger, Sydney 1983
• Caesar, Christ and Constantine, OSV Huntington 1991 ^[1]
• Correggio Jones and the Runaways, CIS, Melbourne 1995
• The Turned Card - Christianity Before and after the Wall, Loyola, Chicago, 1997 ^[2]
• Rome Reshaped, Continuum , New York 1999 ^[3]
• Beyond the Empire, Crossroad, New York 2001
• Stages of the Revolution: A Biography of Raffaello Carboni of the Eureka Stockade. HardieGrant, Melbourne 2004 ^[4]
• The Sibyl, the Shepherd and the Saint. Rome 2007
• Dinny Going Down. Arcadia Melbourne 2007
• Tuscany Antipodean-Style Florence 2010
• A Word in Edgeways Melbourne 2010

• Desmond O'Grady on the Internet Movie Database
• Desmond O'Grady on the Limerick City Council website