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.

His study, Slouching Towards Jerusalem: Reactive Nationalism in the Irish, Israeli and Palestinian Novels, was  published in November 2011. 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