Claire Keegan was raised on a farm in Ireland. Her stories have won numerous awards and are translated into more than twenty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was chosen as a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster, after winning the Davy Byrnes Award-then the world's richest prize for a story-was recently selected by the Times (UK) as one of the top fifty novels to be published in the twenty-first century. Her stories have been published in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. Keegan currently holds the Briena Staunton Fellowship at Pembroke College, Cambridge.

An award-winning narrator, Aidan Kelly appears regularly in theater and television, most notably at the Abbey Theatre, the national theater of Ireland.