After selling their farm, Mr. Nolan’s parents moved the family to a Dublin suburb in 1972 so that Christy, as he was called, could attend a remedial school. In 1979 he transferred to a local comprehensive school, where his classmates included members of the rock group U2. Their 2004 song “Miracle Drug,” with lyrics by Bono, was about Mr. Nolan.

With the unicorn stick, Mr. Nolan “gimleted his words into white sheets of life,” as he put it in “Under the Eye of the Clock.” Liberated, he spent feverish hours at the typewriter. “I bet you never thought you would be hearing from me!” he wrote to an aunt and uncle. In 1981 he published “Dam-Burst of Dreams,” a collection of poems, short stories and plays that impressed critics with its acrobatic wordplay and striking metaphors.

He enrolled in Trinity College Dublin, but left after a year to complete “Under the Eye of the Clock” (1987), an autobiography told in the third person through a narrator named Joseph Meehan. A best seller in Britain and the United States, it made good on the promise of his first book and won the Whitbread Prize, beating out works by the poet Seamus Heaney and the biographer Richard Ellmann.

Mr. Nolan then spent more than a decade writing his first novel, “The Banyan Tree” (1999), the multigenerational story of a dairy-farming family in his native county of Westmeath, seen through the eyes of its aging matriarch. It was inspired, he told Publisher’s Weekly, by the image of “an old woman holding up her skirts as she made ready to jump a rut in a field.” At his death, he was at work on a second novel.

A prominent Los Angeles producer wanted to make a film of Mr. Nolan’s life story. Mr. Nolan turned the offer down.

“I want to highlight the creativity within the brain of a cripple,” he wrote to the producer, “and while not attempting to hide the crippledom I want instead to filter all sob-storied sentiment from his portrait and dwell upon his life, his laughter, his vision, and his nervous normality. Can we ever see eye-to-eye on that schemed scenario?”