Amanda Smyth is Irish Trinidadian, and author of three novels. Her first novel, Black Rock, won the Prix du Premier Roman Etranger, was nominated for an NAACP award, short listed for McKitterick Prize, and selected as an Oprah Winfrey Summer Read. Black Rock was chosen as one of Waterstones New Voices, and translated into five languages. Her second novel, A Kind of Eden, set in contemporary Trinidad, was published in 2013 and optioned as a TV series. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in New Writing, London Magazine, The Times Literary Supplement, Harvard Review and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Fortune, her third novel, based on the early oil industry in Trinidad, was published by Peepal Tree Press and shortlisted in 2022 for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction. Amanda teaches creative writing at Arvon, Skyros, Greece, and Coventry University. She lives in Leamington Spa with her husband and daughter.