Joseph O'Connor's fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay, My Father's House, a Washington Post Book of the Year, and The Ghosts of Rome. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessy Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick www.josephoconnorauthor.com.