EAMON DELANEY

Eamon Delaney is the editor of Magill magazine, Ireland's foremost cultural and political monthly. He is also the author of An Accidental Diplomat, an account of his time in the Irish foreign service, (including the United Nations) and The Casting of Mr O' Shaughnessy, a novel about Irish art and history.

EMER O’KELLY

Emer O’Kelly is a Dubliner. She is the drama critic with the Sunday Independent, for which she also writes literary criticism and a current affairs column. Prior to joining the Sunday Independent in December 1998, she was a newscaster with RTE for eighteen years. She was a member of the Arts Council of Ireland from 1998-2003, and from 2003-2006. She is also a board member of the Irish Museum of Modern Art, having been re-appointed for a second five-year term earlier this year.

JOE HIGGINS

Joe Higgins of the Socialist Party first came to national prominence in the mid- 1990s as a leading figure in the successful movement against water charges in Dublin.
He went on to play a leading role in the protests against the bin tax, which erupted in 2003. In September of that year he was sent to Mountjoy prison for a month, with his Socialist Party colleague Councillor Clare Daly, when he refused to abide by a court injunction against the protests.
He has been a regular speaker at protests against the war in Iraq and is a constant advocate of workers’ rights. He has long been regarded as one of the most effective speakers in Dáil Eireann.

KEVIN HIGGINS

Kevin Higgins was born in London in 1967, and grew up in Galway City. His poetry has appeared widely in literary journals in Ireland, Britain, the United States, Canada, Europe & New Zealand. His work also features in the anthologies Short Fuse, Breaking The Skin: New Irish Poetry, 100 Poets Against The War & Irish Writers Against War. He was a founding co-editor of The Burning Bush literary magazine and is the poetry critic of The Galway Advertiser. In April 2003 he won the Poetry Grand Slam at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, and represented Ireland in the European Grand Slam in Paris.

KEVIN MYERS

Kevin Myers, writer, broadcaster and novelist (Banks of Green Willow, 2001), is author of the best-selling ‘Kevin Myers (2001)’, a gathering of his celebrated and provocative Irishman's Diary columns in The Irish Times, for which he wrote for over twenty-five years (another collection will appear from The Lilliput Press in 2007). He is now a columnist with the Irish Independent.

CHARLES FANNING

Fanning, who is half Irish, grew up in the "very Irish" small town of Norwood, Massachusetts, now a suburb of Boston. He went to Harvard for his bachelor's degree and a master of arts in teaching, then earned an interdisciplinary doctorate in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania, focusing on literature, history, and art.

Fanning's own masterwork is The Irish Voice in America, which covers the entire scope of Irish-American fiction. Published in 1990, with an expanded second edition in 1999, this book was lauded by all the historians and literary critics who supported Fanning's nomination for the Outstanding Scholar award. The American Conference for Irish Studies honoured it in 1991 with its Prize for Literary Criticism, and historian Lawrence McCaffrey says it established Fanning as "the leading Irish-American studies scholar." Fanning, who has written, co-written or edited some dozen books, has two more irons in the fire right now. One is a wide-ranging memoir about his own upbringing and ancestors, which he is enjoying greatly. He is also writing and gathering illustrations for a book on Irish-American culture during the Great Depression.

DESMOND GREEN

Desmond Green is a native of Athlone and received his early education there. He graduated from UCD where he was Auditor of the Literary and Historical Society. He studied and taught at the University of New Brunswick in Canada from which he received an Honorary Doctorate in 1994. He has a strong interest in literature and education and was a founder member of the Dalkey School Project for multi-denominational primary education. Desmond has long thought that the reviews and articles written by John Broderick are some of his best writing and has been instrumental in ensuring that these writings would be published.

MADELINE KINGSTON

A native of Co. Fermanagh, Madeline now lives in Scotland. She developed an interest in John Broderick while working on a postgraduate study of Julien Green. She lectured on Broderick at an ISAIL conference in Bath in 2000 and at the Second John Broderick Weekend in 2001.
With a subvention from Athlone Literary Festival, The Lilliput Press published her first book ‘Something in the Head, The Life and Work of John Broderick’. This was the first full biography of author John Broderick (1927 – 89) Stimulus of Sin, collected prose of John Broderick, also published by The Lilliput Press is her second book.