Roy Foster is Emeritus Professor of Irish History at the University of Oxford and Professor of Irish History and Literature at Queen Mary University of London. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, the Royal Historical Society the Royal Society of Literature, a Member of the Academia Europea, an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College Dublin,  and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has received honorary degrees from the University of Aberdeen, Queen's University of Belfast, Trinity College, Dublin, the National University of Ireland, Queen’s University, Canada, the University of Edinburgh  and University College Dublin as well as an Honorary Fellowship at Birkbeck College, University of London. His books include Charles Stewart Parnell:  The Man and His Family, Lord Randolph Churchill:  A Political Life, Modern Ireland 1600-1972, The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, Paddy and Mr Punch:  Connections in Irish and English History , The Irish Story:  Telling Tales and Making It Up in Ireland, which won the 2003 Christian Gauss Award for Literary Criticism, W.B. Yeats, A Life. I:  The Apprentice Mage 1865-1914 which won the 1998 James Tait Black Prize for biography, and Volume II: The Arch-Poet, 1915-1939,  Luck and the Irish: a brief history of change 1970-2000, Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances, and Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1922, which won a British Academy Medal and the Frokosch Prize from The American Historical Association.  His most recent book, On Seamus Heaney is published by Princeton University Press in their ‘Writers on Writers’ series. He is also a well-known critic and broadcaster.