Ciaran Carson was born in 1948 in Belfast. He has been awarded the Forward Poetry Prize, The Irish Times Literature Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the Yorkshire Post Prize. Shamrock Tea was longlisted for the Booker Prize and The Inferno won the Weidenfeld Translation Prize in 2003. Carson's prose books- Last Night's Fun, The Star Factory, and Fishing for Amber - form a body of work unique in Irish literature.