Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories. 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, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She 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. In 2022, she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters for her body of work to date.