SEBASTIAN BARRY
was born in Dublin in 1955. Novelist, playwright, and poet, his first play Boss Grady's Boys (1988) won the BBC/Stewart Parker Award. In 1989 he was Writer in Association at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, when Prayers of Sherkin (1990) was produced. His 1995 play The Steward of Christendom won the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, the London Critics' Circle Award, the British Writers' Guild Award and the Lloyd's Private Banking Playwright of the Year Award. In 1996 he received The Ireland America Literary Prize, and was Writer Fellow at Trinity College.

Our Lady of Sligo (1998) was joint winner of the Peggy Ramsay Award. His most recent book of poems is The Pinkening Boy (New Island, 2004). His novels include The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (1998), currently being produced for television, and Annie Dunne (2002). His latest novel, A Long Long Way (2005) has been optioned for a film by Noel Pearson.

DERMOT BOLGER
was born in Dublin in 1959. His nine novels include The Woman's Daughter, The Journey Home, Father's Music, The Valparaiso Voyage and the recently acclaimed The Family on Paradise Pier, which traces a real Irish family from the Great War through Ireland in the 1930s, The Spanish Civil War, the streets and gulags of Russia and London during the Blitz. His debut play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, received The Samuel Beckett Award and his most recent play, From These Green Heights, won the Irish Times/ESB Award for Best New Irish Play of 2004. Author of seven volumes of poetry, he has been Playwright in Association with the Abbey Theatre and Writer Fellow in Trinity College, Dublin. Bolger has championed new Irish writers, firstly through Raven Arts Press, which he started as a factory hand, and later through co- founding New Island Books. He devised the best-selling collaborative novels, Finbar's Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar's Hotel and edited The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction.