Anthony Esolen is a professor of English and a writer in residence at Northeast Catholic College in Warner, New Hampshire, USA. A senior editor of Touchstone magazine, Professor Esolen is known for his verse translations of several epic poems, including the three volumes of Dante’s Divine Comedy (Random House, Modern Library), Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (Johns Hopkins), and Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things (Johns Hopkins). A noted essayist and social commentator, Anthony Esolen has published books on a broad range topics from literature, to theology, to education and culture, ancient to modern.

Paul Murray, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, is a writer and diplomat who has served in London, Tokyo, Ottawa, New York and Seoul.

His biography, A Fantastic Journey: The Life and Literature of Lafcadio Hearn (1993), won the Koizumi Yakumo Literary Prize (Japan) in 1995. He has published and lectured in Europe, the USA and Asia. Paul Murray was born in 1975. He studied English literature at Trinity College in Dublin.

He has a Masters degree in creative writing at the University of East Anglia. Paul was a former bookseller. An Evening of Long Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award in 2003 and was nominated for the Kerry Irish Fiction Award. Skippy Dies was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Costa Best Novel Award.