Jack Barry

John Maher (pen name Jack Barry also) was born in Dublin in 1954. He has won numerous awards, including the Francis McManus short story award (R.T.E Radio) and the P.J. O'Connor Radio Play award (R.T.E. Radio).He won the Marianne Pallotti fellowship to the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, California, and the Arts Council of Ireland's largest single literary award, the Lar Cassidy Memorial Award. His novel The Luck Penny was shortlisted on Simon Mayo's Radio 5 Live Book of the Month slot(2007).

He has recently been awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary in Literature to complete his new novel. He has also taken up residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the McDowell Colony, New Hampshire. His stories have been broadcast on R.T.E. and B.B.C.

A former teacher and lecturer in Near Eastern Languages at University College Dublin, his doctoral thesis, Slouching Towards Jerusalem: Reactive Nationalism in the Irish, Israeli and Palestinian Novel, 1985-2005, (SOAS, London) was published in 2011 (Irish Academic Press).

His new novel, A Short History of Darkness, is set between the Irish midlands and the Galilee and was inspired by his experiences among the Druze population of the Western Galilee over a number of years.