Patrick Taylor is a medical researcher and best-selling novelist. He was born in 1941 and brought up in Bangor, Northern Ireland, Taylor studied and practiced medicine in Belfast and rural Ulster before immigrating to Canada in 1970. He has received three lifetime achievement awards including the Lifetime Award of Excellence in Reproductive Medicine of the Canadian Fertility and Andrology Society. He has written or contributed to 170 academic papers and six textbooks and also served as editor-in-chief of the Canadian Obstetrics and Gynaecology Journal, as well as writing a monthly medical humour column and serving as book reviewer for Stitches: The Journal of Medical Humour. Taylor has also published six books of creative writing, all set in Northern Ireland: a short-story collection entitled Only Wounded: Ulster Stories, and three novels: Pray for Us Sinners and its sequel Now and in the Hour of Our Death, and The Apprenticeship of Doctor Laverty (short listed for the BC Book awards fiction prize for 2005). In 2007 The Apprenticeship of Doctor Laverty was reprinted in hardcover under the title, An Irish Country Doctor; it was the Novel of the Month in March 2007. It then became a NY Times bestseller. It has currently been translated into nine other languages. Two sequels were published, An Irish Country Village (March 2008), and An Irish Country Christmas (Oct 2008). Taylor is working on the fourth book in this series. Taylor now lives in Ireland.