Dara Kavanagh is a writer, academic, translator and poet. A native of Dublin, he spent more than a decade working in Africa, Australia and Latin America before returning to settle in Ireland. Dara Kavanagh is the pen name of David Butler, who under his own name has published the novels The Last European, The Judas Kiss and City of Dis, several poetry collections and short story collections, and won the Ted McNulty Prize, the Fish Short Story Award, the Maria Edgeworth Poetry Award and the Benedict Kiely Short Story Award.

Dedalus has published two novels under the Kavanagh name: Prague 1938 (2021) and Jabberwock (2023).

Jabberwock is an anarchic comic novel of wordplay - imagine Flann O'Brien, with a little help from James Joyce, rewriting Alice in Wonderland. It follows Ignatius Hackett, once the toast of 1920s literary 'Dubilin' before he is undone by words and dispatched to Swift's Mental Asylum. With Europe on the brink of war his journalistic skills are remembered, and he is sent across the water to investigate a spate of verbal outrages in a topsy-turvy world where fonts and footnotes flourish and puns and paradoxes proliferate alarmingly. He travels on to France and into the dark heart of Germany, caught up in a sinister chess game of police and informers, spies and revolutionaries, behind which moves the shadowy Ouroboros Brotherhood - and words themselves are in danger of being pressganged as wonder-weapons in the new World War.