Born in Kilkenny, Ireland, in 1979, author and journalist Mark O’Connell studied English at Trinity College Dublin, where he completed a PhD on John Banville. His first nonfiction book, To Be a Machine, a study of transhumanism, won the 2018 Wellcome prize and the 2019 Rooney prize. Notes from an Apocalypse, exploring the end of civilisation, was published in April 2020. His third book, the Writers’ prize-shortlisted A Thread of Violence (Granta, £9.99), about the double murders committed by Malcolm MacArthur in Dublin in 1982, is out now in paperback. O’Connell lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.
