Best known as one of Ireland's most popular cartoonists, Tom Mathews has for many years contributed poems to a number of small magazines and journals. The Owl and the Pussycat is his much anticipated debut collection and contains—as the title suggests—a variety of parodies, homages, versions and subversions, as well as poems which, with a light touch and steady gaze, look into the darker quarters of the human soul.

"Tom Mathews has been an institution in Dublin for 30 years"
The Irish Times

"Is duine an-ghéar, an chliste é"
Seán Mac Réamoinn

"The estimable Tom Mathews"
Fintan O’Toole

Tom Mathews was born in Dublin in 1952. After working in advertising he studied Fine Art at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin. He has been a freelance cartoonist, writer and critic since 1975. His work appears weekly in The Irish Times and Sunday Independent. He has had thirty one-man shows and his paintings have been exhibited in Living Art, the National Portrait Show and at the RHA. He has illustrated a dozen books, written a novel and published three volumes of cartoons. His last book, The New Adventures of Keats and Chapman, was published in 2008. His hobbies are drinking stout and talking too much about James Joyce and Groucho Marx.