Patrick McCabe was born in 1955 in Clones, County Monaghan. He is the author of The Butcher Boy (1992), which won the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for Fiction; The Dead School; Breakfast on Pluto and others. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were both shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Winterwood was published in 2006, and was named the 2007 Hughes & Hughes/Irish Independent Irish Novel of the Year. His most recent novels are Heartland (2018) and The Big Yaroo (2019).