Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1961, and holds an MA in Creative Writing from East Anglia University, England. He is the author of seven novels including Burning Your Own (1988), for which he was awarded the Rooney Prize and a Betty Trask first novel prize, The International (1999), Number 5 (2003), That Which Was (2004), and The Third Party (2007). A collection of his journalism was published as Lapsed Protestant in 2006.
In 2005 he was elected to Aosdána, which recognizes artists whose work has made an outstanding contribution to the arts in Ireland. A memoir, Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times, has just been published in the UK and Canada.