Michael Parker was born in Weymouth, Dorset, in 1949. He is a Senior Lecturer in English at the Liverpool Institute of Higher Education, and has taught full-time at the University of Lódz in Poland, and part-time at the universities of Liverpool and Manchester, contributing to courses on modern Irish literature. His interest in writing from the north of Ireland began in the early 1980s, and he has published a best-selling study of the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (Macmillan, 1993), and is co-editor of Postcolonial Literature (Macmillan, 1995). He has reviewed for the Guardian, the Times Literary Supplement and the Honest Ulsterman, and is currently working on a study of writers and the Troubles, which will examine drama, fiction and poetry from Northern Ireland in the period from 1968 to 1994.

Michael Parker lives in Warrington, Cheshire.