Neil Jordan was born in Rosses Point, Sligo in 1950. He was educated at St. Pauls College, Raheny and went on to study Irish history and English literature at University College Dublin. In 1974, after graduating from UCD, he co-founded the Irish Writers Cooperative. In 1976 he published a collection of his short stories Night in Tunisia through the co-operative, which won the Guardian Fiction prize in 1978. In 1982 Jordan wrote and directed his first feature film, Angel, which won the London Evening Standards Most Promising Newcomer Award. He went on to win awards for The Company of Wolves (1984), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992), which won him an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, as well as numerous other awards. Jordan went on to release several film adaptations of novels, including Interview with the Vampire (1994), The Butcher Boy (1997), and The End of the Affair (1999). He also wrote and directed the films Michael Collins (1996), The Good Thief (2002), Breakfast on Pluto (2005), The Brave One (2007), Ondine (2009), Byzantium (2012), Greta (2018) and Marlowe (2022). In 1996, Jordan was recognised by the French Government for his significant contributions to the arts and literature and became an “Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres”.
He is the author of eight novels and a novella The Dream of a Beast (1983) including The Past (1980), Sunrise with Sea Monster (1994), Shade (2004), Mistaken (2011), The Drowned Detective (2016), Carnivalesque (2017), The Ballad of Lord Edward and Citizen Small (2021) and The Well of Saint Nobody (2023). In 2024 he published his memoir, Amnesiac.