Barry McCrea is the author of a novel The First Verse, winner of the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction, and two works of non-fiction: In the Company of Strangers, a study of rival networks to the family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, and Languages of the Night, about the effect that dying languages and dialects had on the European literary imagination in the twentieth century. He is a professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he has been teaching in its campuses in Rome and Indiana.

Photo credit: Francesco Giannone