Patrick McCabe was born in Clones, Co. Monaghan, near the border of the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, in 1955. In 1974 he qualified as a primary teacher, and taught at St. Michael’s Boys’ National School in Longford. While living in Longford, he also played keyboard with a ballroom music group called the Oklahoma Showband. He moved to Dublin with his girlfriend Margot Quinn in 1978, and taught in Dublin, and in Balbriggan, Co. Dublin from 1978 to 1987. They were married in 1981. He worked as a remedial teacher in Kingsbury Day Primary and Special School, London, 1987 to 1993. In 1987, the family moved to England where McCabe taught at a special needs school in Brent, where he taught until 1993. The McCabe family subsequently returned to Ireland.

In 1978, McCabe won a Hennessy Literary Award for his short story, ‘The Call’, published in the Irish Press. His children’s story The Adventures of Shay Mouse, illustrated by Margot Quinn, was published in 1984, followed by the novel, Music on Clinton St., in 1985. Carn, published in 1989, is a novel set in a border town such as the area where McCabe grew up, during the Northern Ireland Troubles. Subsequent novels include two that were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, The Butcher Boy (1992), his most famous novel to date, and Breakfast on Pluto (1998). McCabe has written extensively for the stage and screen as well as for radio, and films of both The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto were made by director Neil Jordan.

Most of McCabe’s work is set in small towns in the Irish midlands and along the border, and a term coined to describe his work, ‘Bog Gothic’, refers to his setting of dark comedy in the bogland areas of the midlands.