Jennifer Johnston was born in Dublin in 1930 and is one of our foremost Irish writers. Her fifteen novels include The Old Jest, winner of the Whitbread Prize, The Captains and the Kings, winner of the Evening Standard Best First Novel Award and the Yorkshire Post Award for Best Book of the Year and Shadows on Our Skin which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her novel Fools Mortals was published in 2007. She lives in County Derry.