Ronan Bennett

Novelist and screenwriter Ronan Bennett was born in Belfast. His first novel, The Second Prison (1991), a thriller about a member of a group of Irish republican activists, was shortlisted for the Irish Times Irish Literature Prize for First Book. Bennett's second novel, Overthrown by Strangers (1992), is set in Latin America. The Catastrophist (1998) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award. In it, the rise and fall of Patrice Lumumba in the 1950s serves as a vibrant political backdrop to the doomed love affair between writer James Gillespie and an idealistic journalist, Inès. Bennett's fourth novel, Havoc, in Its Third Year (2004) won the Hughes & Hughes/Sunday Independent Irish Novel of the Year award. Bennett's most recent novel, Zugzwang (2006), was published in weekly installments in The Observer, accompanied by illustrations by British artist Marc Quinn.