Short answers, pulled from the story.
Samuel Beckett is best known for the tragicomedy play Waiting for Godot, first performed in Paris in 1953. In a 1998 poll conducted by London's Royal National Theatre, it was voted the most significant English-language play of the twentieth century.
Samuel Beckett received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature, awarded for his writing which, in the Nobel committee's words, "in new forms for the novel and drama - in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation." He learned of the award while on holiday in Tunis with his partner Suzanne, who called it a "catastrophe" for her intensely private husband.
Beckett wrote in French because, as he himself explained, it was easier to write "without style" in a language not his own. He began writing primarily in French after World War II, producing Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable, and Waiting for Godot in that language before translating most of them into English himself.
Beckett joined the French Resistance after Germany occupied France in 1940, working as a courier for the Reseau Gloria network. When the network was betrayed in August 1942, he and his partner Suzanne fled on foot to Roussillon in the Vaucluse, where he helped the Maquis in sabotage operations. The French government awarded him the Croix de Guerre and the Resistance Medal for his work.
Beckett met James Joyce in Paris in 1928, introduced by the poet Thomas MacGreevy. He assisted Joyce with research toward Finnegans Wake and contributed an essay defending Joyce's methods to a collection of critical pieces. The close friendship cooled after Beckett rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia, though Beckett continued to cite Joyce as a major inspiration.
Beckett played first-class cricket as a left-handed batsman and left-arm medium-pace bowler for Dublin University, including two matches against Northamptonshire. This made him the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first-class cricket and thus to appear in Wisden.