Paul Murray
Paul Murray was born in Dublin in 1975. He was educated at Trinity College Dublin and took a master’s degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. A former bookseller, Murray lives in Dublin. His first novel, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, and nominated for The Kerry Irish Fiction Award. His second novel is Skippy Dies, which was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize as well as shortlisted for the Costa Novel Prize and the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. It was also shortlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Book Award. His debut feature film Metal Heart was released in Ireland last year, and he currently has two projects in development with BBC Comedy.
His most recent novel, The Bee Sting, was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize and won the Gold Prize Book of the Year at the inaugural Nero Book Awards 2023.
Natasha Trethewey
Natasha Trethewey served two terms as the 19th Poet Laureate of the United States (2012-2014). She is the author of five collections of poetry, Monument (2018), which was longlisted for the 2018 National Book Award; Thrall (2012); Native Guard (2006), for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, Bellocq’s Ophelia (2002); and Domestic Work (2000), which was selected by Rita Dove as the winner of the inaugural Cave Canem Poetry Prize for the best first book by an African American poet and won both the 2001 Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Book Prize and the 2001 Lillian Smith Award for Poetry. In addition to her poetry, Trethewey is the author of two memoirs The House of Being (2024) and Memorial Drive (2020). Her book of nonfiction, Beyond Katrina: A Meditation on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, appeared in 2010. She is the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Beinecke Library at Yale, and the Bunting Fellowship Program of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard. At Northwestern University she is a Board of Trustees Professor of English in the Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences. In 2012 she was named Poet Laureate of the State of Mississippi and in 2013 she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin was born in Cork City in 1942, educated there and at Oxford before spending her working life as an academic in Trinity College, Dublin. She was a founder member of Cyphers, a literary journal. She has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Irish Times Award for Poetry, the O’Shaughnessy Award of the Irish-American Cultural Institute which called her “among the very best poets of her generation”, and the International Griffin Poetry Prize.
Her collections include Acts and Monuments (1972), Site of Ambush (1975), The Second Voyage (1977, 1986), The Rose Geranium (1981), The Magdalene Sermon (1989) which was shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award, The Brazen Serpent (1994), The Girl Who Married the Reindeer (2001), Selected Poems (2008), The Sun-fish (2009, winner of the International Griffin Poetry Prize) and The Boys of Bluehill (2015).
Legend of the Walled-up Wife (translations from the Romanian of Ileana Malancioiu) appeared in 2011.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is a Fellow and Professor of English (Emerita) at Trinity College, Dublin and a member of Aosdána.