Audrey Magee

Twelve years of reporting came before Audrey Magee wrote fiction. She was Ireland correspondent of The Times for six years, covering the Troubles, the peace process and the Omagh bombing, and she also filed on the war in Bosnia, on child labour in Pakistan and Bangladesh, and on the effects of perestroika in Central Asia. She studied German and French at University College Dublin and journalism at Dublin City University. Her first novel, The Undertaking, follows a German soldier on the Eastern Front and the woman he marries by proxy to win leave from the fighting; it took a place on the Irish Book Awards shortlist, was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award, and translated into ten languages. The Colony, from 2022, puts an English painter and a French linguist on a small island off the west coast of Ireland, each pursuing something the islanders never asked for, while the violence on the mainland presses in. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. Magee lives in Wicklow.