Lisa Carey grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. She attended Boston College; later, while working on her MFA in Writing from Vermont College, she worked as a bookseller at Brookline Booksmith. She went to Ireland to research her first novel, and ended up living there for five years. In 1998 she published her debut, the critically-acclaimed The Mermaids Singing, followed two years later by In The Country of the Young. Every Visible Thing won a Lambda Literary Award for Fiction and Love in the Asylum won a Massachusetts Book Award. Her novels have been translated into a dozen languages and optioned for film.
She has been awarded fellowships at The Hawthornden Castle Writer’s Retreat, The Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, The MacDowell Colony, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and Ragdale. She lives in Portland, Maine, with her husband and son, and returns to Ireland whenever she can.