Seamus Deane is a Derry-born poet, novelist and critic. A founding director of the Field Day Theatre Company and member of the Royal Irish Academy, Deane's first novel, Reading in the Dark (1996) won the Guardian Fiction Prize, the 1996 South Bank Show Annual Award for Literature, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize and the Irish Literature Prize in 1997, as well as being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1996 and translated into over 20 languages.