Twenty-five years on and the hunger strikes are as rawly divisive as ever.
The latest book on the period, simply called Hunger Strike, puts the politics to one side and explores the events of 1981 from the artist's and writer's perspective.
Launched today at west Belfast's Féile an Phobail, the book is edited by Danny Morrison, who worked as press officer for the hunger strike campaign.
Among the 50 contributors are the late Cyril Cusack, writer Edna O'Brien, film maker Terry George and journalist Nell McCafferty.
"On a personal level it still devastates me and those of my generation," said Morrison of the period. "Mentally and intellectually we were operating at a surreal level.
"During the hunger strike our office on the Falls road was open 24 hours a day for seven months. We slept on the floor. The British government was complaining about this huge republican propaganda machine. We had a telex machine."
As secretary of the Bobby Sands Trust, Morrison is these days charged with promoting and promulgating the memory of Sands and the hunger strikers. His interest in this latest book was "to revisit why artists and writers and poets basically kept their head down in that period. Some of them were of course alienated by the IRA's campaign, others possibly lacked the courage to speak out. Others maybe, their political differences were so strong, they decided just to opt out," he said.
Hunger Strike is a mixture of the personal and the political. There is a poem Cyril Cusack was moved to write the night Joe McDonnell died. There's a piece by Iranian Pedram Moallemian about how the street address for the British embassy in Tehran was changed from Winston Churchill Street to Bobby Sands Street. Terry George writes about how he came to make Some Mother's Son.
But not everyone who was invited to contribute to the collection replied.
"People should understand that it is possible to speak out against wrong without necessarily endorsing an aspect of struggle they disagree with," Morrison said.
For more detail of events at Féile an Phobail see www.feilebelfast.com