Writer and academic Barry McCrea grew up in Dalkey, County Dublin and was educated by Jesuits at Gonzaga College and at Trinity College Dublin. Teaching and researching in the departments of English, Romance Languages & Literatures, and Irish Language & Literature at the University of Notre Dame, McCrea’s is one of the most significant voices to have emerged from Irish Studies in North America. He is the author of two monographs – Languages of the Night (Yale UP, 2015) which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016 and In the Company of Strangers: Narrative and Family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust (Columbia UP, 2011) – as well as a novel, The First Verse (Carroll & Graf, 2005), winner of the Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes and Noble Discover award.