FINTAN O'TOOLE is an Irish columnist, drama critic and literary editor who has worked with The Irish Times in many roles, as drama critic for the New York Daily News and is a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books.
DECLAN BURKE is one of Ireland’s leading crime fiction authors. He reviews regularly for a variety of national newspapers and magazines, and hosts the website Crime Always Pays. Declan has published several novels including Absolute Zero Cool which was shortlisted in the crime fiction section for the Irish Book Awards 2011, and received the Goldsboro/Crimefest ‘Last Laugh’ Award for Best Humorous Crime Novel in 2012. He is the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (2011), and the co-editor, with John Connolly, of Books to Die For (2012). Declan lives in Wicklow with his wife and daughter, where he is not allowed to own a cat, or be owned by one.
IAN ROSS is Fellow Emeritus of Trinity College. Professor Ross taught English literature from Chaucer to the present day and has published on American and European literatures from the seventeenth to twenty-first centuries. He is editor of Henry James, The Europeans in the Oxford World’s Classics series, and has published essays and articles on writers from Voltaire to Italo Calvino. HIs sophister option, ‘Detective Fiction’ was the first course of its kind in Ireland and introduced Popular Literature to the School of English. An introduction to Declan Burke (ed), Down these Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century was the first overview of Irish crime fiction from 1840 to the present day. Together with the historian Professor William Meier (TCU), he is currently co-editing a special number of Éire-Ireland, devoted to crime in Ireland since 1921.
