He may have won the main award at Listowel Writers’ Week and be current fictional favourite of President Barack Obama, but Cork-born writer Joseph O’Neill is something of an outsider in Irish literary circles.

His novel Netherland, published last year, has wowed critics to the extent that they compare it favourably with F Scott Fitzgerald's masterpiece The Great Gatsby. The New York Times described it as “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”.

O’Neill is now the darling of the American literati but until last week’s gong in Listowel he had received little recognition in his native land. Like Obama, and despite the solid Irishness of his name, O’Neill is the exotic creation of multiple cultural identities and, as he himself points out, none at all. His father was Irish, his mother Turkish, he grew up in Holland, speaks with a precise English accent and is now an American citizen.

Netherland was his third novel and the first to receive literary acclaim. He wrote a memoir in 2002, Blood-Dark Track: A Family History, which was reasonably received. But until Netherland he was best known for being married to a senior editor of Vogue magazine, the plus-one on her invites to Manhattan parties.

The story goes that Mick Jagger recommended the book to O’Neill after the Rolling Stone failed to recognise the author at a party. Now he is being described by New York magazine as King of New York and an interview with the author appears on the video screens in the back of yellow cabs in Manhattan.

Obama’s imprimatur put the seal on his success. The president intimated to the New York Times magazine in early May that he had grown tired of briefing books and has been spending his evenings with O’Neill’s novel – the first non-business reading he’s allowed himself since Inauguration Day. The novel, which was scheduled to be published in paperback in America in June, was immediately put on shop shelves. Sales of the hardback jumped by 40% in a week, and Vintage Books ordered an additional print run of 70,000 copies.

It is the quintessential American dream come true for a writer who chronicles “the compromised beauty of the American dream”, according to his publisher.

O’Neill started his memoir in 2002 by describing events around his birth in the Bon Secours hospital in Cork on 23 February 1964. His father, who worked in the oil industry, flew home the following day and told his mother that her father, Joseph Dakad, had died. The baby was christened Joseph in his honour.

O’Neill’s Irish grandfather James was a fervent Republican, an “agitated, moody man prone to explosions of temper”, according to the memoir. O’Neill senior provided for 10 children as a truck driver and labourer. He was interned in the Curragh during the War of Independence and jailed during the second world war for IRA membership.

O’Neill’s maternal grandfather, a prosperous Turkish hotelier, was also imprisoned in the war, having been detained by the British in Palestine. “The detention had something to do with spying for the Germans,” he writes.

What strikes O’Neill about the two men is that his Turkish grandfather was the type his Irish grandfather might have killed without remorse. A critical incident in the memoir is O’Neill being handed a rusted Colt .45 by one of his paternal uncles. “That’s the gun that shot Admiral Somerville,” he is told. Vice-admiral Henry Somerville recruited young Irish men for the British army and was shot by the IRA in 1936. O’Neill suspects that his grandfather was one of the assassins.

The book also features a fierce argument between O’Neill and a Republican-leaning uncle about whether he is Irish or not. The writer is furious his nationality is questioned.

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