Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, is the author of six bestselling books. He has won numerous awards for his fiction, among them the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and three Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award, the IMPAC award and the Prix Jean Monet de Littérature Européenne.
He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the
Decade in 2016 in a nationwide poll run by Dublin Book Festival.
His latest novel, Strange Flowers, set in Nenagh and London, was published in August 2020 by Penguin Random House. A law graduate and former civil servant, Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.