Novelist, poet and playwright Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955 and attended Trinity College, Dublin. He has written for the theatre since 1986, his prize-winning plays OUR LADY OF SLIGO and THE STEWARD OF CHRISTENDOM receiving rave reviews. WHISTLING PSYCHE was produced in 2004 at the Almeida Theatre in London, starring Claire Bloom and Kathryn Turner, THE PRIDE OF PARNELL STREET was premiered at the Tricycle Theatre in London 2007, and ANDERSEN'S ENGLISH had a successful run at the Hampstead Theatre. Sebastian's first novel, THE WHEREABOUTS OF ENEAS MCNULTY, was published in 1998 to great acclaim, and his second, ANNIE DUNNE, in 2002. A LONG LONG WAY was published in the spring of 2005 and was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the IMPAC Prize.  THE SECRET SCRIPTURE was short-listed for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2008 and won the Costa Book of the Year Award, the James Tait Black Award, the Independent Booksellers' Award and the Hughes & Hughes Irish Book of the Year award, among others. It was also nominated for the Los Angeles Times fiction award.  ON CANAAN'S SIDE, which like its two predecessors was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, won the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.  Sebastian has recently delivered a new novel, THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN, which will be published in May 2014. Sebastian Barry lives with his wife and three children in County Wicklow, Ireland. Author photo: Linda Brownlee

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THE TEMPORARY GENTLEMAN - Jack McNulty is a ‘temporary gentleman’, an Irishman whose commission in the British army in the Second World War was never permanent.  In 1957, sitting in his lodgings in Accra,...

A LONG LONG WAY - Willie Dunne is the son of a Dublin policeman, a gifted, sensitive boy with a fine singing voice. Not tall enough to follow in his father's footsteps, when General Kitchener's call comes for...

ANNIE DUNNE - In a small corner of Wicklow in the 1950s, two women in their sixties hold to a subsistence farm. Sarah has taken in Annie, a hump-backed spinster whom life has passed by. Then two small children,...

ON CANAAN'S SIDE - Lilly Bere's grandson Bill has hanged himself, yet another victim of America's adventures abroad. Lilly's son Ed fought in Vietnam and was terribly scarred by his experience; but his own son's scars,...

THE SECRET SCRIPTURE - Lost in the darkness of Sligo in the 1930s, a darkness illuminated only by the Saturday night dance in Strandhill, Roseanne works as a waitress in the Cafe Cairo. It is there that she meets her...