Paul Murray

Paul Murray (born 1975) is an Irish novelist, the author of the novels An Evening of Long Goodbyes, Skippy Dies, The Mark and the Void, and The Bee Sting.

Murray was born in Dublin in 1975, the son of a professor of Anglo-Irish Drama at University College Dublin and a teacher.

Murray attended Blackrock College in south Dublin, an experience that would later provide the basis for the school in Skippy Dies.

He studied English literature at Trinity College, Dublin, and subsequently completed his master's in creative writing at the University of East Anglia.

He also spent time in Barcelona as an English teacher, a time he did not enjoy, describing it as "a brief and unhappy stint teaching English to a Catalan businessman, who pointed out many faults in my grammar I had not known about hitherto".

He describes Gravity's Rainbow as a very influential book to him.

Murray has written four novels: his first, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Prize in 2003 and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.

His second novel Skippy Dies was longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the 2010 Costa Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

It was also #3 on Time magazine's top ten works of fiction from 2010.

His third novel, The Mark and the Void, was one of Time's top ten best fiction books for 2015, and joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize in 2016.

His most recent novel, The Bee Sting, was published in 2023.

Described as "a tragicomic triumph" and a source of "pure page-turning pleasure" in The Guardian, it was shortlisted for the 2023 Booker Prize, won an Irish Book Award as 2023 Novel of the Year, and won the Fiction category in the inaugural Nero book awards.

Murray wrote the screenplay for 2018 Irish film Metal Heart, which was directed by Hugh O'Conor.