Padraic Fallon was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1946, the sixth and youngest son of the poet and playwright Padraic Fallon. He is chairman of an international financial publishing company whose headquarters are in London, and is a director of one of the largest UK newspaper groups. He was awarded the Wincott Special Award for outstanding financial journalism in 1981. He is married, with four children and a granddaughter, and lives in Wiltshire and London. He wrote a dramatised memoir of his childhood, A Hymn of the Dawn, which was published by Lilliput Press, Dublin in 2003. The Circles of Archimedes is his first novel.