McLaverty, Michael (1904–92), writer and teacher, was born 5 July 1904 at Magheross, near Carrickmacross, Co. Monaghan, son of Michael and Catherine McLaverty. His father worked in a hotel in the town until he moved to Rathlin Island, and later Belfast, when the young Michael was 5 years old. He attended St Malachy's College in the city, where an inspiring teacher instilled in him a love of Shakespeare's writings. He entered QUB (October 1924) and studied physics; he obtained a B.Sc. (1928) and immediately took his H.Dip.Ed., completing his teaching practice in St Mary's, Strawberry Hill, near London. The following year he began teaching at St John's public elementary school in Colinward St., west Belfast. He was later admitted to the degree of M.Sc. in QUB (1933).
During his time at St John's he wrote his first five novels and fifteen short stories. In the 1930s McLaverty had developed a distinctive style in precise, unsentimental, but compassionate short stories. By the late 1930s, however, he switched his energies from short stories to the novel. Call my brother back (1939) contrasts the traditional world of Rathlin with the northern troubles in a family context. Another novel, Lost fields (1941), and his collection of short stories, The white mare (1943), explore the Belfast of his childhood and deal with the underlying tensions in Irish rural life. In the period 1949–55 he published five other novels: Three brothers (1948), Truth in the night (1951), School for love (1954), The choice (1958), and Brightening day (1965) deal with ordinary people and the dilemmas they encounter in their families and communities. McLaverty's writings were influenced by Chekhov, Tolstoy, Katherine Mansfield, Gerard Manley Hopkins (qv), and the Irish short-story writers Liam O'Flaherty (qv) and Daniel Corkery (qv).
As headmaster of St Thomas's intermediate school, a large school for boys in Ballymurphy, off the Falls Road, he gave his first job to the young Seamus Heaney, in whom he cultivated an interest in the writings of Chekhov and Tolstoy and the Irish writers Mary Lavin (qv) and Patrick Kavanagh (qv). McLaverty deemed Heaney to be the only genius he had ever met, and his work and success were a great source of pride and joy to him. His encouragement of the young John McGahern (qv) was of as much benefit to McLaverty himself, as their short but intense correspondence gave McLaverty the energy to resume his writings.
Between his resignation from St Thomas's (autumn 1963) and the early 1970s he taught part-time at St Joseph's training college and St Dominic's High School, one of Belfast's best-known grammar schools. In 1981 his old alma mater recognised his contribution to literature by awarding him an honorary master's degree. In the same year he won the American Irish literary fellowship, a prestigious literary award of $10,000, in recognition of his ‘impressive body of work as a short story writer and novelist’ (Hillan King, The silk twine, 253). He died 20 March 1992 in Co. Down.
He married (1933) Mary Conroy (formerly Giles), a young widow and fellow teacher at St John's; they had two sons and two daughters.