A Very Irish Christmas: The Greatest Irish Holiday Stories of All Time

James Joyce (1882-1941) was an Irish novelist and poet. A contributor to the modernist avant-garde movement, he is regarded as one of the most influential and important authors of the twentieth century and is best known for Ulysses (1922), a novel that parallels Homer's Odyssey using an array of literary styles.

William Butler Yeats was an Irish poet and one of the foremost figures of 20th century literature. A pillar of both the Irish and British literary establishments, in his later years he served as an Irish Senator for two terms.

Colm Tóibín is an Irish novelist, essayist, playwright, and poet. He is currently the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University. He has been short-listed three times for the Booker Prize and has won the Los Angeles Times Novel of the Year, the Costa Novel of the Year, the Stonewall Book Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and the Irish PEN Award for his contribution to Irish literature.

Anne Enright is author of seven novels, most recently Actress. She has been awarded the Man Booker Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She lives in Dublin.

William Trevor was born in Mitchelstown, County Cork, in 1928 and spent his childhood in provincial Ireland. He studied at Trinity College, Dublin. He is the author of fourteen novels and thirteen collections of short stories, and he has won many prizes. His short stories appeared regularly in the New Yorker, and his Collected Stories was chosen by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as a Best Book of the Year. His novels include Love and Summer, nominated for the Man Booker Prize and selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; The Story of Lucy Gault, short-listed for the Man Booker Prize, the Whitbread Fiction Prize, and also selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; and Death in Summer, a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book of the Year.