Tim O’Brien was born in Minnesota and graduated from Macalester College in St Paul. He established himself as one of the leading writers of his generation in 1973 when he published ‘If I Die In A Combat Zone’, the compelling account of his own tour of duty in Vietnam, and is widely regarded as the finest novelist the Vietnam War has produced.
Orlando is the star of Gap Yah, a comedy sketch that became a viral hit after being published on YouTube in 2010. It video became a viral hit, with 660,000 views in its first month. It has been viewed over five million times and was the winner of the 2010 YouTube Homegrown Comedy Hit of the Year. Orlando has reported for BBC London News, commented on horse racing and appeared as a guest on Big Brother’s Big Mouth, and has been hailed as ‘the most popular Sloane since Princess Diana’.
Patrick O’Brian was born in 1914 and published his first book, Caesar, when he was only fifteen. In the 1960s he began work on the idea that, over the next four decades, evolved into the twenty-novel long Aubrey–Maturin series (with an extra unfinished volume published posthumously). In 1995 he was awarded the CBE, and in 1997 he received an honorary doctorate of letters from Trinity College, Dublin. He died in January 2000 at the age of 85.
Rory O’Connell is Darina Allen’s brother, co-founder of The Ballymaloe Cookery School and one of its main teachers. He worked for many years with Myrtle Allen as chef at The Ballymaloe House Hotel in Cork as well as with Alice Waters at Chez Panisse in California. In his thirty years of teaching he has taught many of the now stars of the British and Irish cooking scene: Thomasina Miers, Rachel Allen and Stevie Parle.
Joseph O’Neill lives in New York and teaches at Bard College. He is the author of four novels, Netherland (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008),The Dog, This Is the Life and The Breezes, as well as a memoir, Blood-Dark Track. His short stories have been published in the New Yorker and Harper’s, and his literary criticism has appeared in the Guardian, the New York Times, the Irish Times, the Atlantic, Granta and other publications.
Joyce Carol Oates is a novelist, critic, playwright, poet and author of short stories and one of America’s most respected literary figures. She has written some of the most enduring fiction of our time, including We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University and a recipient of the National Book Award and the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction.
Bryan Lee O’Malley is an award-winning Canadian cartoonist. He has been working on a series of graphic novels called ‘Scott Pilgrim’. He writes the words and draws the pictures. He occasionally makes music under the name Kupek.
