Patrick McGuinness

The recorded working language is French and English. Employment is recorded with University of Oxford. Distinctions recorded are Eric Gregory Award, Prix du Premier Roman, Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and Knight of the French Order of Academic Palms.

• Name — Patrick McGuinness • Born — 2 June 1968 • Birthplace — Tunisia • Occupation — Poet, novelist, academic, literary critic • Children — 2 • Education — University of Cambridge University of York University of Oxford

McGuinness was born in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian mother and an English father of Irish descent from Newcastle-upon-Tyne. He grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He attended Clifton College in Bristol, before studying for a bachelor's degree in English Language and Literature at Downing College, Cambridge, and a master's degree in American Studies (Ezra Pound and French Symbolism) at the University of York before going on to a DPhil in French theatre at Magdalen College, Oxford.

McGuinness's production is divided between literary criticism and fiction, memoir and poetry. In December 2025, while reviewing his book Ghost Stations in the Times Literary Supplement, Harry Eyres called him 'the closest British literature may have to WG Sebald, which is no mean feat'. Jonathan Keates in the Literary Review called McGuinness's writing 'a lantern for us to negotiate the shadows'.

McGuinness published his first poetry collection, The Canals of Mars, in 2004. His poems have appeared in numerous anthologies and translated anthologies of British and Irish poetry. His first novel, The Last Hundred Days (2011) was centred on the end of the Ceaușescus' regime in Romania, and was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and the Authors' Club Best First Novel Award; a French version was published under the title Les Cent Derniers Jours. It won the Writers' Guild Award for Fiction and the Wales Book of the Year. He won Wales Book of the Year a second time, in 2015, for his memoir Other People's Countries. His memoir of childhood in the Belgian town of Bouillon, Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory, appeared in 2014 and won the Duff Cooper Prize and the Wales Book of the Year, and was shortlisted for the Pen Ackerley Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. His second novel, Throw Me to the Wolves (2019), won the Encore Award for best second novel from the Royal Society of Literature. It is a fictionalised account of the murder of Joanna Yeates in Bristol in 2010, and the subsequent persecution and false accusations against schoolteacher Christopher Jefferies, who was McGuinness's English teacher at school in Bristol in the 1980s. In 2024 his third book of poems, Blood Feather, was shortlisted for the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize. Also in 2024 he and Stephen Romer won the Scott Moncrieff Prize for their translation of The Day's Ration by Gilles Ortlieb.