James Butler

James Butler was born on 4 June 1955 in Kilkenny and lives in Ballinteer, Dublin. He has a background in education and drama and holds an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. He taught in a primary school in Tallaght for many years, where he founded the community drama theatre group F-Troupe.

In 2005, his first play for children, Stuck in the Mud, was nominated for an Irish Times Theatre Award. He spent many years writing in collaboration with the teenage members of Kathryn Coffey's Stage 51 Theatre Group, and several of the plays performed by the group are available on Playshare, Youth Theatre Ireland's curated collection of plays.

In 2011, his play for teenagers The Teen Commandments was included in the Trinity College London Anthology of Award-Winning Plays. In 2016, his radio play The Carpet Clown was produced by RTÉ Drama On One as part of the PJ O'Connor Awards. His young adult novel Dangerous Games was published by Little Island Books in 2019 and won the Great Reads Award in 2020.

His second young adult novel, Crying Wolf, was published in 2024 and was selected as the 2025 Teen Citywide Read.