Jennifer Johnston – Year of election 2009

Jennifer Johnston is an Irish writer – Ireland, she has said, is her “main theme” – and the author of more than a dozen novels. The daughter of a writer and an actress, she only started writing at the age of 35. “I just woke up one morning,” she said, “and thought, ‘I must do something with my life.’ ” Her first novel, The Captains and the Kings, published in 1972, won the Author's Club First Novel Award, and The Old Jest (1979) took the Whitbread Novel Award. Five years ago Roddy Doyle caused outrage at a Joyce gathering in New York when he said that Ulysses needed a good editor and that James Joyce was not the best Irish writer – that title was Jennifer Johnston's.

“She has created a world of her own,” Derek Mahon has written. “Of such material is the finest literature made.”