John Maher was born in Dublin in 1954. He is winner of the Francis McManus Short Story Award (R.T.E) and the P.J. O'Connor Radio Play Award (R.T.E). His novel, The Luck Penny (2007), won the Arts Council of Ireland's largest literary award, the Lar Cassidy Award. He has been awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary in Literature (2009) to work on his next novel. He has taken up residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the McDowell Colony, New Hampshire. His stories have been broadcast on R.T.E. and B.B.C.

He has recently completed his doctoral thesis Slouching Towards Jerusalem: Reactive Nationalism in the Irish, Israeli and Palestinian Novels, 1985-2005 at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. This will be published in 2010. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Department of Mediterranean Studies, at King’s College, London. He has three children, and lives in Rathdowney, Co. Laois.

www.johnpatrickmaher.com