Lannan Foundation

John McGahern

John McGahern was born in Dublin in 1934 and resides in County Leitrim, Ireland. Generally considered by critics to be one of his country’s greatest living writers, McGahern is the author of five novels, which include the celebrated Amongst Women, published in 1990, and four collections of short stories.

In his most recent novel, By the Lake, he writes of life in a close-knit Irish rural community where, “the days disappear in the attendance of small tasks.” Of McGahern Irish poet and literary critic Seamus Deane says, “At last an Irish author has awakened from the nightmare of history and given us a sense of liberation which is not dependent on flight or emigration or escape.”

John McGahern Bio and Cross Links

James Alan McPherson

Dinaw Mengestu

Dinaw Mengestu was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1978. In 1980 he immigrated to the United States with his mother and sister, joining his father, who had fled the communist revolution in Ethiopia two years before. A graduate of Georgetown University and of Columbia University’s MFA program in fiction, Mengestu has written for many publications. He recently reported stories for Harper’s and Jane magazine, profiling a young woman who was kidnapped and forced to become a soldier in the brutal war in Uganda, and for Rolling Stone on the tragedy in Darfur. His first novel, The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears (titled Children of the Revolution in Britain), has been nominated for The Guardian First Book Award in the U.K. and the Prix Femina Étranger in France, and earned him a place as one of the U.S. National Book Foundation’s “5 Under 35” for 2007. He is also the recipient of a 2006 fellowship in fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Dinaw Mengestu Bio and Cross Links

Anne Michaels

Susan Mitchell

Herbert Morris

Sineád Morrissey

Sineád Morrissey was born in Portadown, Co. Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1972, grew up in Belfast, and holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin. She has published three collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), and The State of the Prisons (2005). Her awards include the Patrick Kavanagh Award, an Eric Gregory Award, the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award, and the Michael Hartnett Prize for Poetry. She has twice been shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. She is currently Lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University, Belfast.

Sineád Morrissey Bio and Cross Links

Alice Munro

Richard K. Nelson

Naomi Shihab Nye

Naomi Shihab Nye is a poet, essayist and children’s author. She was born to a Palestinian father and an American mother and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem and San Antonio. Drawing on her Palestinian-American heritage, the cultural diversity of her home in Texas, and her experiences traveling in many parts of the world including Asia and the Middle East, Nye uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity.

Naomi Shihab Nye Bio and Cross Links