Originally from Belfast, Paddy Brennan is a PhD student at the University of Liverpool's Institute of Irish Studies. He is completing a Blair Chair-funded thesis on depictions of food-consumption and self-starvation in twentieth and twenty-first century Irish fiction, focusing on writers such as Edna O'Brien, John McGahern, Claire Keegan and Sally Rooney. He has contributed a chapter to The Routledge Companion of Sally Rooney, in addition to having short fiction published in Stand Magazine.