Lisa McInerney

McInerney was raised by her grandparents in Gort, County Galway, and started the blog Arse End of Ireland in 2006, writing under the name 'Sweary Lady' about working-class estate life; it won an Irish Blog Award and led directly to her fiction career.

The Glorious Heresies (2015), her debut novel, interweaves a gangster's mother who accidentally kills an intruder with a teenage drug dealer and a burnt-out prostitute across recession-era Cork; it won both the Women's Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize for debut fiction in the same year, an unusual double.

The Irish Times called her 'arguably the most talented writer at work in Ireland today'; she continues to write journalism and fiction from Cork.