In 2016, novelist and playwright Sebastian Barry described Ryan in The Guardian as "the king of the new wave of Irish writers".
[3] He holds a degree in law from the University of Limerick where he now lectures in Creative Writing.
[11] In September 2021 he became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean-Monnet Prize for European Literature.
[14] Ryan's first two novels, The Spinning Heart (2012) and The Thing About December (2013), were between them rejected 47 times before being accepted for publication.
[15] The Thing About December (written before The Spinning Heart) was published in 2013 and was adapted into an Irish-language film, Foscadh, in 2020.