Joseph O’Neill is an acclaimed Irish novelist of Irish and Turkish descent. His new novel is Godwin (2024), a New York Times “Best Book of the Year” that recounts the odyssey of two brothers crossing the world in search of an African soccer prodigy who might change their fortunes. The Boston Globe called it, “a medieval Grail quest reimagined for the 21st century.”

Joseph O'Neill
4:30 p.m. Thursday, March 13, 2025
Conversation / Q&A
University at Albany
Multi-Purpose Room, Campus Center West
1400 Washington Avenue Albany NY 12222
Free and open to the public
Books will be for sale. A signing will follow the conversation.

Presented by the NYS Writers Institute
https://www.nyswritersinstitute.org/josephoneill

O’Neill is also the author of Netherland (2008), a PEN/Faulkner Award-winning novel about a Staten Island cricket team made up of recent immigrants. The New York Times’s Dwight Garner called it, “the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.”

About the novel Godwin
Mark Wolfe, a brilliant if self-thwarting technical writer, lives in Pittsburgh with his wife, Sushila, and their toddler daughter. His half-brother Geoff, born and raised in the United Kingdom, is a desperate young soccer agent. He pulls Mark across the ocean into a scheme to track down an elusive prospect known only as “Godwin”—an African teenager Geoff believes could be the next Lionel Messi.

Narrated in turn by Mark and his work colleague Lakesha Williams, Godwin is a tale of family and migration as well as an international adventure story that implicates the brothers in the beauty and ugliness of soccer, the perils and promises of international business, and the dark history of transatlantic money-making.

As only he can do, Joseph O’Neill investigates the legacy of colonialism in the context of family love, global capitalism, and the dreaming individual.

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Cosponsored by UAlbany’s Writing & Critical Inquiry Program (WCI), the English Department’s Creative Writing Program and Young Writers Project, and the Honors College