Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two previous collections of short stories: Multitudes and Intimacies. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize - for her novel The Meeting Point - and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is the winner of the 2022 E. M. Forster Award. Lucy was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and in 2019 she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories.