Michael McGirr was born in 1961. He is the author of the best-selling, Things You Get For Free, a comedy about travelling in Europe with his mother. He is also responsible for Bypass: the story of a road, a quirky biography of Australia’s main street, the Hume Highway. Bypass is currently a Year 12 English text in Victoria. The heart of Bypass is a bike ride that Michael, not the fittest man on the road, made from Sydney to Melbourne with the ever-patient Jenny, now his wife and more patient than ever. By the end of the book, they were expecting their first child. The Lost Art of Sleep takes the story further. It was inspired by the arrival of twins not long after Michael and Jenny’s first little boy. Suddenly there were five in the bed. This meant that Michael, who was used, after 20 years in the priesthood, to long nights on bad mattresses now had a great mattress but only short nights.

  Michael McGirr has been a regular columnist and reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Canberra Times and a presenter on ABC radio. He has also been was editor of Australian Catholics and publisher of Eureka Street and fiction editor of Meanjin. At the moment, he is a secondary school teacher in Melbourne where he lives near a port with his wife and three children who want to be pirates.