Ita Daly was born in Drumshanbo, Co Leitrim and lived there until she was thirteen when she moved with her family to Dublin. She was educated at University College Dublin where she took a B.A in English and Spanish and an M.A. in English. Later she taught for 11 years before combining full-time writing with motherhood.
She has published five novels, one collection of short stories and two books for children. Her latest work is a re-telling of Irish Myths and Legends commissioned by Oxford University Press.She has won two Hennessy Literary Awards and an Irish Times Short Story Award. Her last novel, Unholy Ghosts, was long listed for the Impact Award.Her work has been translated into Swedish, Danish, Japanese, Italian and German and her short stories have appeared in magazines in Ireland, England and America. One of them, The Lady With the Red Shoes, is currently on the school curriculum in secondary schools in Germany.
She was married to the writer and editor David Marcus who died in 2009. She has one daughter and one granddaughter. She  lives  in Dublin. Ita is a member of Aosdána.

Peter Cunningham grew up in Waterford and was educated at Waterpark School, Glenstal Abbey School and University College Dublin.   He worked as an accountant and a trader of commodities until 1986 when his first novel was published. Titled ‘Noble Lord’, it was a thriller, written under the pseudonym Peter Lauder. A further four thrillers followed. In 1993, a novel, ‘Who Trespass Against Us’ dealt with the unexpected death of a child. Four subsequent novels, known as the Monument novels, are set in Monument, a fictionalized version of Cunningham's hometown Waterford. They are: 'Tapes of the River Delta', 'Consequences of the Heart', 'Love In One Edition' and 'The Sea and the Silence'. In the Monument novels Cunningham fuses political material with psychological realism and a nascent, lyrical sensitivity to place, in this way winning an international reputation as a writer of highly crafted plots and enigmatic dreaminess.
In 2003, ‘The Taoiseach’, dealt with current Irish political events, based on the life of Irish premier, Charles Haughey.Two further thrillers were published under the pseudonym Peter Benjamin. In 2010, a satirical novel dealing with the collapse of Ireland's economy, ‘Capital Sins’, was published. Peter Cunningham is a member of Aosdána, and lives in County Kildare.