Richard English was born in 1963 in Belfast, where he is Professor of Politics at Queen's University. He is the author of several books, two of them published by Pan Macmillan: Armed Struggle: The History of the IRA, which won the Politics Book of the Year Award for 2003 from the Political Studies Association and was shortlisted for the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, and Irish Freedom: The History of Nationalism in Ireland, which was longlisted for both the Duff Cooper Prize and the Samuel Johnson Prize and won the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. Professor English is a frequent media commentator on Irish politics, and has written on Ireland for the Irish Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Newsweek, the Financial Times and the Times Higher Education Supplement.