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Joseph O’Connor was born in Dublin in 1963. He attended UCD, Oxford University and the University of Leeds. His novels include the million-selling Star of the Sea, Redemption Falls, Ghost Light and Shadowplay, and the international bestsellers My Father’s House (a Washington Post Book of the Year) and The Ghosts of Rome (AN POST Irish Book of the Year Award 2025). The latter two books are part of a projected trilogy inspired by Monsignor Hugh O’Flaherty and the Escape Line he organised from within Vatican City during the Nazi occupation of Rome; the third novel, Lost Waters, will be published in 2027. Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book of the Year and twice for the Costa Award, and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the AN POST Novel of the Year and Listeners’ Choice Awards, Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Literature, and the Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year. His work is translated into forty languages. A CD of his radio columns for RTE, The Drivetime Diaries, reached number one in the Irish charts. He is Frank McCourt Chair and Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.