About the Author

Mary Lavin was born in 1912 in the USA, but moved as a child with her Irish parents to Athenry, Co. Galway, and then to Dublin and her farm in Co. Meath. Lavin wrote two novels, The House in Clewe Street and Mary O’Grady, but is best known for her many short story collections, including Tales from Bective Bridge, The Becker Wives and Other Stories, In the Middle of the Fields, Happiness and Other Stories, and The Stories of Mary Lavin (Volumes I, II and III). She enjoyed an eminent reputation in the land of her birth, where she twice served as writer-in-residence at the University of Connecticut and had many stories published in the prestigious New Yorker magazine. She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Katherine Mansfield Prize and the Allied Irish Banks Literary Award. She was also awarded an honorary doctorate from University College Dublin in 1968. Mary Lavin was also a member of Aosdána, Ireland’s state-sponsored affiliation of distinguished creative artists; she was elected Saoi, its highest honour, in 1992 for achieving ‘singular and sustained distinction in literature’. In her private life, she was widowed for fifteen years following the death of her first husband, William Walsh, in 1954, with whom she had three daughters. In 1969, she married the distinguished former Australian Jesuit priest Michael McDonald Scott, who predeceased her in 1990. Mary Lavin died in 1996 and is buried with her family in Navan, Co. Meath.