Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron of Dunsany

Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany, known as Lord Dunsany, was an Anglo-Irish writer and dramatist born in London in 1878 and who died in Dublin in 1957. He wrote in English and gained a reputation in the English-speaking world during the 1910s. Today he is regarded as one of the founders of modern fantasy, and his work remains read because it opened paths that later writers followed.

He came from an old Irish noble family. He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and inherited the title when his father died in 1899. He served as an officer in the Second Boer War and in the First World War. In 1916 he was wounded in Dublin during the Easter Rising, after he went into the city to offer help. He married Lady Beatrice Villiers in 1904, who typed his manuscripts and helped with his collections, and they had one son. Outside writing, he was a keen hunter and an accomplished chess player, and he worked with W. B. Yeats and Lady Gregory, supporting the Abbey Theatre.

His output includes short stories, novels, plays and poetry. In his tales he blends folk traditions, Celtic epic, Eastern exoticism and a dreamlike tone, inventing pantheons and imagined worlds with no fixed place or date. His comedies were very popular in the first half of the twentieth century and in some ways anticipate the theatre of the absurd. In novels such as The King of Elfland's Daughter he explores mortality and love between different worlds. Much of his fiction was illustrated by Sidney Sime, whose fantastic and satirical style accompanied many of his stories.

His legacy is considerable. H. P. Lovecraft acknowledged him as an early influence, and many critics see in his stories forerunners of the fantastic genre that Tolkien, Borges and others later pursued. His name is still linked to heroic fantasy and to the invention of private imaginary worlds.