Dr. Tony Macaulay is a bestselling author, leadership consultant, peacebuilder, broadcaster and suicide prevention advocate from Northern Ireland. He was raised at the top of the Shankill Road in West Belfast at the start of thirty-five years of “The Troubles” in Northern Ireland, an experience that has shaped his life.
He has spent the past 35 years working to build peace and reconciliation at home and abroad, working with hundreds of youth and community groups to break down barriers of mistrust, hatred and division. He has applied his experience and learning into leadership development and management of change and transition in many voluntary, public and private sector organisations. His memoirs of growing up in Belfast during the Troubles, Paperboy (HarperCollins 2011), Breadboy (Blackstaff Press, 2013) and All Growed Up (Blackstaff Press, 2014), have been critically acclaimed bestsellers in Ireland. His autobiography Little House on the Peaceline (Blackstaff Press, 2017, 2nd edition, so it is, 2022) tells the story of how he lived and worked on the peaceline in Belfast in the 1980s.
His debut novel Belfast Gate (so it is, 2019) is a satirical comedy drama set in 2019 about a group of Catholic and Protestant women who start a campaign to take down Belfast’s 50 year old peace walls. The novel was book of the week in the Irish News. Paperboy was adapted into a hit musical by Andrew Doyle & Duke Special at the Lyric Theatre in Belfast in 2018 and 2019. In the summer of 2022 the same team produced a musical adaptation of the sequel, Breadboy, once again to sell out audiences in the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. Tony has performed book readings at a range of respected literary festivals including: Aspects Literature Festival, Edinburgh Book Fringe, Belfast Book Festival, Dublin Book Festival, 4 Corners Festival and Féile an Phobail. He is now a regular speaker on Northern Ireland, peace building and creative writing at universities and colleges in Europe and the USA.
He has given talks at Lehigh University and DeSales University in Pennsylvania, the University of Denver, Colorado, the University of Notre Dame and Goshen College in Indiana and Pepperdine University, University of California, Irvine, Loyola Marymount University, Los Angeles and California State University, Dominguez Hills in California. In 2012 the W.B. Yeats Society of New York invited Tony to present a reading of Paperboy in the National Arts Club as part of the 1st Irish Festival. In 2013 and 2014 he performed a series of readings from his books at the New York Irish Center as part of the 1st Irish Festival and returned to the National Arts Club in New York to preview ‘Little House on the Peace Line’ in 2016. As a prominent writer, journalist and broadcaster, Tony has contributed to NVTV, BBC Radio 4, BBC Radio 2, Downtown Radio and BBC Radio Ulster. He has also written for the Belfast Telegraph, the newspaper he once delivered.
