John Mackenna is the author of 16 books - novels, short-story collections, memoir, biography and poetry. He is a winner of the Hennessy, Irish Times and C Day Lewis awards and a Jacobs Radio Award for his documentary series, How the Heart Approaches What it Yearns, made with his long-time friend Leonard Cohen. He has written a dozen stage plays, a number of radio plays, including The Woman at the Window, on the life of Kildare writer Mary Leadbeater. This won a silver medal for RTÉ at the Worldplay Radio Festival in New York. He has just finished a tour with Between Your Love and Mine, a requiem written by Leonard Cohen and arranged/directed by MacKenna. He will tour nationally next year with his one-man play The Mental. John teaches creative writing at the Adult Education Department in Maynooth Universitry, lives in Co Carlow and is married to the writer Angela Keogh.