Born and educated in Enfield, North London, Geraldine McCaughrean is the youngest of three children. She worked at a London publishing house for ten years, and now works from home, in Berkshire. She has written around a hundred and sixty books, mostly for children. She has won numerous awards, including the Whitbread Book of the Year Children's Novel Award, The Guardian Prize, and the Carnegie Medal.

“[Robert Fitzgerald’s translation is] a masterpiece . . . An Odyssey worthy of the original.” –The Nation “[Fitzgerald’s Odyssey and Iliad] open up once more the unique greatness of Homer’s art at the level above the formula; yet at the same time they do not neglect the brilliant texture of Homeric verse at the level of the line and the phrase.” –The Yale Review “[In] Robert Fitzgerald’s translation . . . there is no anxious straining after mighty effects, but rather a constant readiness for what the occasion demands, a kind of Odyssean adequacy to the task in hand, and this line-by-line vigilance builds up into a completely credible imagined world.” –from the Introduction by Seamus Heaney