He was an Irish novelist, playwright, short story writer, theater director, poet and literary translator.

His literary and theatrical work is characterized by gloomy, impersonal and tragicomic life experiences, often associated with black comedy and nonsense. His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, incorporating more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference.

He is considered one of the last modernist writers and one of the key figures of what Martin Esslin called the theater of the absurd.

He lived in Paris for most of his life, wrote in French and English. During World War II, he was a member of the French resistance group Gloria SMH and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949.

He received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 for his writing, which - in the new forms of novel and drama - takes off in the scarcity of modern man.

In 1961, he shared the first Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges. He was the first person to be elected Saoi Aosdáne in 1984.