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Richard Power was born in Waterford, south Ireland. He became a civil servant in Dublin, but at weekends and in the evenings wrote. He published his masterpiece, The Hungry Grass, in 1969. A year later he died suddenly at the age of 41.
Declan Kiberd is Ireland's greatest living critic, internationally celebrated for his work on literature and colonialism. He is the author of Inventing Ireland, Ulysses and Us and Irish Classics. He has won many literary prizes and is currently Professor of English at the University of Notre Dame in the USA.