Thomas McCarthy was born in County Waterford in 1954. He was educated at University College Cork and worked for many years at Cork City Libraries. As well as two novels and a collection of essays and diaries, he is the author of several collections of poetry including The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996) and Merchant Prince (2005). He has held positions as Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program at University of Iowa and as Professor of English at Macalester College, and is former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and Cork Literary Review. His writing has received numerous accolades including the Patrick Kavanagh Award and the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, and has been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch, among other languages. He lives in Cork.