John Maher Biography

John Maher was born in Dublin in 1954. He is winner of the Francis McManus short story award (R.T.E) and the P.J. O'Connor Radio Play award (R.T.E).He was awarded the Marianne Pallotti fellowship to the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, California, to begin The Luck Penny and the Arts Council of Ireland's largest single literary award, the Lar Cassidy Award, to complete the novel. He has recently  been awarded an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary in Literature to complete his next novel. He has also taken up residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the McDowell Colony, New Hampshire. His stories have been broadcast on R.T.E. and B.B.C.

A former teacher and lecturer in Near Eastern Languages at University College Dublin, his doctoral thesis, Slouching Towards Jerusalem: Reactive Nationalism in the Irish, Israeli and Palestinian Novel, 1985-2005 (SOAS, 2009) will be published this autumn. While researching his thesis, he lived for four months in the Druze Arab village of al-Buqea/Pekiin, in the Western Galilee, Israel.

  He has three children, Brian, Miriam and Roisin, and lives in Rathdowney, Co. Laois. He is currently Visiting Research Fellow in the Dept of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College, London.