Gerard Donovan is an acclaimed Irish-born novelist, photographer and poet currently living in Plymouth, England, working as a lecturer at the University of Plymouth.

Donovan attracted immediate critical acclaim with his debut novel Schopenhauer’s Telescope, which was long-listed for the Man Booker Prize in 2003. His subsequent novels include Doctor Salt (2005), Julius Winsome (2006), and, most recently, Sunless (2007). However, Sunless is essentially a rewritten version of Doctor Salt — ultimately very different from the earlier novel, but built upon the same basic narrative elements—of which Donovan has said: “Doctor Salt… was a first draft of Sunless. I wrote [Doctor Salt] too fast, and the sense I was after just wasn’t in the novel. … I saw the chance to write the real novel, if you like, [when Doctor Salt was due to be published in the United States in 2007] and this I hope I’ve done in Sunless.”

Prior to his career as a prose author, Donovan published three collections of poetry: Columbus Rides Again (1992), Kings and Bicycles (1995), and The Lighthouse (2000).