Lenny Abrahamson is a native of Dublin. He studied philosophy at Trinity, where he co-founded the Trinity Video Company with Ed Guiney, who has gone on to produce all of Abrahamson’s work. This entry into filmmaking led to his first short, 3 Joes, which won a number of awards at European festivals. After time spent undertaking post-graduate study and directing a number of commercials, Abrahamson returned to film with his first feature Adam and Paul in 2004, Garage in 2007, What Richard did in 2012, Frank in 2014, Academy Award nominated Room based on Emma Donoghue’s novel of the same name in 2015 and The little Stranger in 2018. Abrahamson films have won him a total of 6 IFTA’s and an Academy Award- Best Director nomination. Despite having a timeless quality derived from a style indebted to European directors such as Robert Bresson, the Dardenne Brothers and Bruno Dumont, his films remain distinctively Irish. This spare nature is brilliantly balanced to provide audiences with just enough information to draw their own conclusions. 

He is one of the directors and executive producers of the limited series Normal People, based on the novel of the same name by Sally Rooney. The series was released in 2020 and was nominated for four Emmy awards, including Outstanding Directing for Abrahamson. He also will direct and produce the forthcoming tv series Conversations with Friends, set to be released in May 2022 and based on Sally Rooney's debut novel. 

Photo credit: Shane O'Connor 

Sheila Armstrong is a writer and editor from the north-west of Ireland. She is the author of two books: How To Gut A Fish (2022), a collection of short stories, and Falling Animals (2023), her debut novel. Her writing has been listed for the Society of Authors Awards, the Kate O'Brien Award, the Irish Book Awards, and the Edge Hill Prize. She is an Arts Council Next Generation Artist. 

photo credit: Ruth Medjber

Actors Paul O'Hanrahan, Mick Greer, Chris Bilton together with musician John Goudie make up Balloonatics Theatre Company.

Their show takes the form of a dramatised reading which serves as a platform for theatrical performances designed to animate Joyce’s text so as to enhance its appeal to students and newcomers to Joyce. At the same time, the juxtaposition of work from Dubliners and Ulysses offers scope for comparison that will challenge and intrigue those already familiar with Joyce’s work. The 75-minute duration of the piece provides time for questions afterwards. 

Balloonatics is a Dublin-based theatre company which emerged out of an award-winning production of Circe, from Joyce’s Ulysses, at the 1983 Edinburgh Festival, in which Mick Greer took the lead role and Paul O’Hanrahan directed. From early days as Cambridge University students, the pair have acted together many times since on a range of Joyce adaptations including Nightfall from Finnegans Wake and the Cyclops episode from Ulysses. Cyclops was produced at the Joyce centenary in Dublin in 2004, the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2005 and a year later at the Merriman Summer School, in Lisdoonvarna, County Clare.

Paul and Mick teamed up again in Dublin to present Joycean theatre for Bloomsday 2012 and gave a seminar on ‘Performing Finnegans Wake’ at the International Joyce Symposium in Trinity College, Dublin. In 2014 they performed two stories from Joyce’s Dubliners on an EFACIS tour of universities in Portugal including Lisbon, Porto and Braga.

Profile photo shows Paul and Mick in a scene from 'Counterparts', a short play from the story in the collection Dubliners by James Joyce.

Photo credit: Sarah Clancy 

 

John Banville was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945, the youngest of three siblings. He was educated at Christian Brothers schools and St Peter’s College, Wexford. After college John worked as a clerk for Ireland’s national airline, Aer Lingus, before joining The Irish Press as a sub-editor in 1969. Continuing with journalism for over thirty years, John was Literary Editor at The Irish Times from 1988 to 1999. 

Banville published his first book, a collection of short stories titled Long Lankin, in 1970. When he turned 70 in 2015 one might have thought he would start to slow down, but on the contrary, he seems to go into a higher gear, having two new books released in 2017 and doing some teaching stints. He is an author who is already translated into many languages, and one of the leading literary voices in Ireland with international scope and appeal to many. The fact that he is strongly influenced by Yeats creates a link to our previous translating project Yeats Reborn (2013-2015); however, Banville's charm is of course the beautiful prose in which he interweaves philosophy and aesthetics. So the EFACIS board decided that we would launch the Banville Project: Literature as Translation.

Photo credt: Douglas Banville 

Sara Baume's debut novel, Spill Simmer Falter Wither, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize and has been widely translated. In 2017, her second novel, A Line Made by Walking, was shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize, a prize set up specifically to celebrate experimental fiction. She is a graduate of the International Writing Program run by the University of Iowa and the recipient of a Literary Fellowhip from the Lannan Foundation in New Mexico. she lives on the south-west coast of Ireland, where she works as a visual artist as well as a writer; her first solo exhibition took place in London in 2018. 

Her non-fiction debut handiwork was shortlisted for the Folio Price in 2021 and her third novel Seven Steeples came out in April 2022. 

 

Sara is now performing and travelling with the multimedia project The Alphabet of Birds. She has recently performed The Alphabet of Birds at the Centre for Irish Studies at Charles University Prague

 

 

Photo Credit: Sarah Davis Goff

 

Sam Blake is a pseudonym for Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin, the founder of The Inkwell Group publishing consultancy and the national writing resources website Writing.ie. She is Ireland's leading literary scout who has assisted many award winning and bestselling authors to publication. Vanessa is Chair of Irish PEN and founder of the Murder One international crime writing festival. She has been writing fiction since her husband set sail across the Atlantic for eight weeks and she had an idea for a book. 

She's the author of the trilogy Cat Connoly Garda and both her debut Little Bones and The Dark Room were shortlisted for Irish Crime Novel of the Year in 2016 and 2021. 

Find out more about Sam Blake at www.samblakebooks.com, follow her on Twitter @samblakebooks, or Vanessa @inkwellHQ  www.inkwellwriters.ie.

For practical information on writing written by writers, events, competitions and submission opportunities check out www.writing.ie.

Photo credit: Alice Rose Jordan 

Faye Boland's first collection Peripheral examines the experience of the Irish Diaspora (she herself was an Irish emigrant) as well as the 'otherness' of displacement in Irish society.

Of Peripheral poet Eileen Sheehan says: "Boland's poems chart a restless search for home, for purpose. A judicious collection in an era when people feel increasingly disconnected from their own sense of worth."

The tension between otherness and belonging is resolved in her mediative nature poetry in which she metamorphizes into the Irish landscape, willingly surrendering to its serenity. She celebrates the beauty of Irish flora and fauna, rugged landscape and seascapes, the natural wilderness of the Earth that defies human attempts to order and control. At this juncture her writing moves from the physical to the ethereal.

Her work questions  our disconnectedness with each other and with the Earth's gifts, but offers us the possibility of redemption through reflection and preservation of the abundance that is ours if we can just slow down and savour it, perhaps adjusting our values along the way. 

Her work has been published in various journals and magazines. In 2013, she was shortlisted for the Poetry on the Lake XIII International Poetry Competition and, in 2017, she has won the Hanna Greally International Literary Award alongside the Robert Leslie Boland poetry prize 2018. 

Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known writers. His thirteen previous novels include The Journey Home, Father’s Music, The Valparaiso Voyage, The Family on Paradise Pier, A Second Life, New Town Soul, The Fall of Ireland, TanglewoodThe Lonely Sea and Sky and his most recent An Ark of Light, published in 2018. 

His first play, The Lament for Arthur Cleary, received the Samuel Beckett Award and one of his Edinburgh Fringe First Awards. His numerous other plays include The Ballymun Trilogy – which charts forty years of life in a Dublin working class suburb; Walking the Road, about the death of the Irish poet, Francis Ledwidge, during World War One; The Parting Glass and a stage adaptation of Joyce’s Ulysses, which has toured China.

He is also a poet; his ninth collection of poems, The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss, was published in 2012, and his New and Selected Poems, That Which is Suddenly Precious, appeared in 2015. While in 2020 he wrote his first and only collection of short stories, Secrets Never Told.

He devised the bestselling collaborative novels, Finbar’s Hotel and Ladies Night at Finbar’s Hotel, to which many of Ireland’s best known writers anonymously contributed chapters.

As an 18-year-old factory hand, he founded the radical Raven Arts Press which first published many of his contemporaries. He closed this press in 1992 to co-found New Island Books – one of Ireland’s leading publishers. He has edited numerous anthologies, including The Picador Book of Contemporary Irish Fiction. A former Writer Fellow at Trinity College, Dublin and Playwright in Association with the Abbey Theatre, Bolger writes for most of Ireland’s leading newspapers and in 2012 was named Commentator of the Year at the Irish Newspaper awards. 

 

Photo credit: Peter O'Doherty 

Poet, writer and broadcaster Pat Boran is one of the best-known of his generation of Irish poets.

He has published more than a dozen books of poetry and prose — among them Waveforms: Bull Island Haiku (2015), The Next Life (2012) and A Man is Only As Good: A Pocket Selected Poems (2017), as well as the humorous memoir The Invisible Prison (2009), the popular writers' handbook The Portable Creative Writing Workshop, now in its fourth edition, and Then Again (2019).  His most recent pubblications are The Statues of Emo Court (2021) and Building the Ark (2022). 

He is a former presenter of The Poetry Programme and The Enchanted Way on RTÉ Radio 1, and works part-time as a literary editor in which capacity he has edited numerous anthologies of poetry and prose, including, with Gerard Smyth, the bestselling anthology If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song, the Dublin: One City, One Book designated title for 2014, and, with Eugene O’Connell,The Deep Heart’s Core (2017). 

Since 2015 the authors regularly releases black and white photographs alongside his poems, while in 2020 he started publishing various short poetry films. 

He is a member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists, writers and musicians. 

Photo credit: Pat Boran 

Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied in Trinity in Dublin and in 2005 was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year.  In 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize. In 2017 she received the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Inaugural Travel Bursary for work on Anne More, the wife of John Donne and she has just received a sixth award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to support the publication of her debut poetry collection, The Work of a Winter, and to write for her second collection. She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and teaches English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast. 

The Work of a Winter contains poems written over sixteen years. They range over history, family relations and stories, observations of birds and nature.  They are often narrative, and many attempt to give voice to women and men whose voices we haven’t been able to hear whether from poverty or gender or social standing: a grandfather who worked in the Mill in Sion; Micheal O’Cleirigh, one of the annalists of the first history of Ireland or a woman who is being forced to give up her child in a home on the Ormeau Road.  It reflects the idea that poetry can give intimate imaginative access to people’s lives.

 

Photo credit: Malachi O'Doherty

 

Colette Bryce is a poet from Derry, Northern Ireland. Her first collection The Heel of Bernadette (2000) received the Aldeburgh Prize and the Strong Award for new Irish poets. She won the UK National Poetry Competition for the title poem of her second book, The Full Indian Rope Trick (2004), which was followed by Self-Portrait in the Dark in 2008. From 2009-2013 she was Poetry Editor for the journal Poetry London. She received the Cholmondeley Award for poetry in 2010.

The Whole & Rain-domed Universe (2014), which draws on her experience of growing up in Derry during the Troubles, received a Christopher Ewart-Biggs Award and was shortlisted for the Forward, Costa, and Roehampton poetry prizes. Selected Poems (2017) was a PBS Special Commendation and winner of the Pigott Poetry Prize 2017.

In recent years, Colette has held writing fellowships at the universities of Newcastle, Manchester, Notre Dame and TCD, and most recently the 2018 Heimbold Chair in Irish Writing at Villanova University, PA. A new collection of poems, The M Pages, was published by Picador in 2020. 

Photo credit: Sophie Davidson

Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, two collections of short stories, with a third forthcoming in 2024, several stage plays and radio dramas, and is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019). Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Imison Award, the Irish Writers' and Screenwriters' Guild Award, the Commonwealth Writers' Award (Canada & Europe), the Edge Hill Short Story Prize Readers' Choice Award, a Fiction Uncovered Award, a K. Blundell Trust Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2018 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2021 she won the BBC National Short Story Award for "All the People Were Mean and Bad" and in 2022 she was the recipient of the EM Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. The Sunday Times proclaimed her "One of Ireland's most essential writers", whilst the Irish Independent said of Intimacies: "There is a stunning, original talent at work here: a sharp political mind, a precise observational eye, and an extraordinary capacity for empathy." Derry Girls writer Lisa McGee has said of her work, "Heart-stoppingly good. Lucy Caldwell is a masterful writer."

Lucy's work has been translated into several languages, a.o. French, Spanish, Catalan, Polish, Croatian and Turkish. 

Her website is www.lucycaldwell.com and she tweets @beingvarious

 

photo credit: Debbie Taussig

 

 

Aifric Campbell is an Irish writer based in the UK. Aifric grew up in Dublin and moved to Sweden where she read Linguistics and lectured in Semantics at the University of Gothenburg. After 14 years in investment banking she decided to focus on the fiction she’d been writing since childhood. She received her PhD in Critical and Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in 2007 where she has also lectured. Her writing has won awards from the Arts and Humanities Research Council, a Thayer Fellowship at UCLA and various writing residences at Yaddo in New York. Aifric teaches at Imperial College, London and has previously taught at the Unversity of East Anglia and the University of Sussex. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, The Irish Times, ELLE, Tatler, The Sunday Telegraph, The Sunday Business Post. Aifric spent 14 years at Morgan Stanley where she became Managing Director on the London trading floor.

She published three short fiction, The Book of Men, The Irish Times and  New Irish Short Stories, and three novels: The Semantics of Murder (2008), inspired by an unsolved murder of a brilliant mathematician in LA, The Loss Adjustor (2010) which tells the story of a woman who is haunted by the loss of her childhood friends and On the Floor, which was long listed for the Orange Prize 2012.

In 2012 she also wroto the voice over script for the movie C.K., inspired by the real life case of an Amsterdam accountant who embezzled 16 million euros and disappeared.

 

Marina Carr’s plays to date are Ullaloo, 1989; Low in the Dark, 1991; The Mai, 1994; Portia Couhglan, 1996; By the Bog of Cats, 1998; On Raftery's Hill, 1999; Ariel, 2000; Woman and Scarecrow, 2004; The Cordelia Dream, 2006; Marble, 2007; 16 Possible Glimpses, 2009.  Her two plays for children are Meat and Salt, 2003 and The Giant Blue Hand, 2004.  The RSC produced the world premiere of her reimagining of Hecuba at the Swan Theatre in September 2015, and in August 2015 the Abbey Theatre produced a major revival of By the Bog of Cats.  Her reimagining of Anna Karenina played for two months in the Abbey Theatre’s main house finishing at the end of January 2017.

Her work has been produced by The Abbey Theatre, The Gate, Druid, The Royal Court, Wyndhams Theatre, The RSC, The Tricycle, The MacCarter Theatre, San Diego Rep, Milwaukee rep.

She is translated into many languages and produced around the world.

She also wrote a new, contemporary translation of Rigoletto for Opera Theatre Company, which toured Ireland in 2015, and wrote an original oratorio as part of a commission for Wicklow County Council that brought together choirs from throughout County Wicklow with solo singers and the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra in November 2016.

Prizes include Windham-Campbell Prize, The Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, The American/Ireland Fund Award, The E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, The Macaulay Fellowship and The Puterbaugh Fellowship. She is a member of Aosdána. 

She has taught at Trinity, at Villanova and at Princeton, however she currently lectures in the English department at Dublin City University.

She is published by The Gallery Press, Nick Hern Books and Faber & Faber.   

Photo credit: Yousef Khanfar 

Ruth Carr ​was born in Belfast where she lives and works as a freelance tutor and editor, concerned with raising the profile of women in literature. In 1985 she edited ​ The Female Line, the first anthology of women’s writing to come out of Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement, Belfast, relaunched as an e-book with herpress in 2016). She compiled the section on contemporary women’s fiction in ​ The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing IV/V (Cork University Press, 2001), was a co-editor for ​ The Honest Ulsterman​ poetry magazine​ ​ for about 14 years, and she has written an essay on Word of Mouth Women’s Poetry Collective (of which she was a founding member) in the recently published Female Lines ​ (New Island, 2017).   Her poetry has appeared in a wide range of anthologies and journals and she has read to audiences in places including Derry/ Londonderry, Strabane, Armagh, Dublin, London, Lancaster, Moscow, Oslo and of course, her home city, Belfast. She has published three collections: ​There is a House​ and ​The Airing Cupboard (Summer Palace Press, 1999 & 2008) and most recently, ​ Feather and Bone (Arlen House, December 2017).  "[Her] poems combine a disciplined craftsman’s feel for imagery and rhythm with personal qualities that I can only sum up with inadequate clichés like warmth and deeply-felt humanity​."​ Louis Muinzer.

About her last collection she said: "Mary Ann McCracken was born in Belfast in 1770, Dorothy Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in 1771. Their paths never crossed yet their lives shared similar preoccupations and activities - reading, letter writing, enthusiasm for the ideas of The  Enlightenment, the education of the poor, the abolition of slavery and lifelong devotion to a  more conspicuous brother. In writing about them I have kept to the facts - where there are facts - but I have drawn on my imagination to respond to these two women’s deep and lengthy lives. There are lots of gaps - this is not a biographical history. These poems are essentially a personal response to two remarkable women."

 

Photo courtesy of Malachi O'Doherty

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collections, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press) and The Last Resort (2021), a micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019 and won the EU Prize for Literature. 

Photo credit: Jonathan Ryder 

Sarah Clancy is a page and performance poet from Galway. Her most recent collection 'The Truth and Other Stories' and was published by Salmon Poetry in 2014. She has two previous collections to her name, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Press, Belfast, 2011) and Thanks for Nothing, Hippies. (Salmon Poetry, 2012).

She has been placed or shortlisted in several of Ireland’s most prestigious written poetry competitions including The Ballymaloe International Poetry Prize, The Listowel Collection of Poetry Prize and The Patrick Kavanagh Award. Her work has been anthologised in ‘Windharp: Poems from Ireland since 1916’ Edited by Niall Mc Monagle and in ‘Even the Daybreak 35 years of Salmon Poetry’ Edited by Jessie Lendennie’ and included in Poetry Ireland Review’s Rising Generation issue. Her work has been published in the United States, Canada and the UK, and in translation in Poland, Slovenia, Mexico and Italy. 

In performance poetry she won the Cúirt International Festival of Literature Grand Slam Championships in 2011, she was runner up in the North Beach Nights Grand Slam Final in both 2012 and 2013 and was runner up in the All-Ireland Grand Slam Championships in 2013. In 2015 she won the Bogman’s Cannon Irish People’s Poet award. 

She is on twitter @sarahmaintains and her books can be ordered here.

Photo credit: Caroline Kelly Stanley 

Evelyn Conlon is a novelist and short story writer who has been described as one of Ireland’s major truly creative writers. Observant and suffused with wit, her work has been widely anthologized and translated, including into Tamil; her selected short stories Telling is now available in Chinese. She is editor of four anthologies, including Cutting the Night in Two, and Later On, which became a centerpiece for a series of lectures titled The Language of War at the University of Bologna.

Conlon's novel Skin of Dreams was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year in 2003 and her most recent novel Not the Same Sky, has been described in The Irish Times as “rich, intelligent and complex … carefully researched, beautifully written and utterly compelling”.  Eilís Ní Dhuibhne adds that despite the horror of the underlying Famine theme, expectations are refreshingly confounded, and as in all her work, Conlon “chooses not to patronise her characters”. The title story of her collection Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour was performed at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival. Her radio essays are heard frequently on RTÉ, and she is an adjunct professor with the Carlow University, Pittsburg, MFA Writing Program. Evelyn is a member of Aosdána. 

Photo credit: Derek Speirs

With an exciting blend of eclectic fiddle and guitar music, Zoë Conway and John Mc Intyre bring to the stage sympathetic arrangements of traditional Irish music, compositions and songs, old and new.  The husband and wife folk duo possesses a rare facility to draw pieces into their repertoire from other genres such as classical, jazz and world music and express this material in way which not only displays the sheer range and knowledge of both instrumentalists but also exhibits the wonderful versatility of their instruments.

They have released two recordings to date - the newest release is a superb collection of live European performances, Live in Concert, released in spring 2017. The album showcases their mesmerising musical interaction on-stage, and also reveals some of their more virtuosic repertoire outside of the Irish traditional genre. Relaxed and atmospheric, the respect and understanding that they have of traditional Irish music and song also shines through. 

Their debut duo album, entitled Go Mairir I Bhfad (Long Life To You), received a glorious 5 stars from national paper, The Irish Times.  For this unique album, they commissioned twelve leading Irish composers to each compose a piece specifically for Zoë and John, for fiddle and guitar, with the aim of collectively presenting a snapshot of traditional Irish music alive today.  The renowned composers who took part in the project were Liz Carroll, Steve Cooney, Frankie Gavin, Andy Irvine, Charlie Lennon, Donal Lunny, Máirtín O’Connor, Peadar Ó Riada, Mícheál Ó Súilleabhán, Tommy Peoples, Niall Vallely and Bill Whelan.

They have also been collaborating with award winning musicians, Julie Fowlis and Eamon Doorley, and in Autumn 2018 released a new collection of songs inspired by Irish and Scots Gaelic poetry entitled, 'Allt'.  Emotive and powerful melodies coupled with thoughtful and understanding accompaniment, this album recorded live in the round, captures the spirit and the energy of a live performance.  The release of these albums has brought international attention to the duo, and so they are increasingly in demand in Ireland and abroad for performances, talks and workshops.

Zoë, no stranger to the stage, has performed with an impressive list of international artists including Riverdance, Damien Rice, Lou Reed, Nick Cave, Rodrigo y Gabriella to mention but a few.  In contrast to this, she has been an important figure within classical music circles in Ireland and abroad, as her crossover discipline has allowed her the pleasure of appearing as soloist with acclaimed orchestras such as The Irish Chamber Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony Orchestra and German WDR Symphony Orchestra; pieces recited include her own compositions and works composed for her by world renowned Irish composer, Bill Whelan.

John grew up in the Cooley Mountains of north County Louth where he took up guitar at 8 years of age.   He began his career as electric guitarist with the successful indie band, The Revs with whom he performed on many famous stages and festivals including Oxygen, and Slane in Ireland, Reading and Leeds in the UK, and toured extensively in USA, Australia and Europe.  He has worked alongside many world renowned producers, and is now also producing and recording in many  genres.  John studied classical guitar and piano for many years, and from early childhood was immersed in the language, songs and traditional dance music of south west Donegal - his father's homeplace.     

Together, Zoë Conway and John Mc Intyre have been described as “simply one of the best folk duos on the planet” (BBC), and audiences in Ireland and beyond keep coming back for more.  They have performed for rock stars, millionaires and dignitaries around the world, including Irish Presidents Mary Mc Aleese and Michael D. Higgins.  Zoë is a 'Folk Instrumentalist of the Year 2018' nominee from RTE Radio 1 Folk Awards.  They were awarded Best Live Show from popular YouTube channel, Balcony TV, and have received in excess of a combined half a million views online.   "An ceol is binne agus is cruinne dá gcuala mé riamh."

Further information is available on their website: https://www.zoeandjohn.com/.

Photo credit: Conal McIntyre

Cónal Creedon is a novelist, playwright and documentary filmmaker.

Appointed Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at University College Cork (2016).

His published books include: Pancho and Lefty Ride Out (1995), Passion Play [‘Book of The Year’ BBC4 Saturday Review](1999), Second City Trilogy (2007), The Immortal Deed Of Michael O’Leary (2015), Cornerstone, an anthology of student writing. (ed.) UCC/Cork City Libraries (2017).

His prose has been translated into German, Bulgarian, Italian, Chinese with English extracts published in China.

Cónal’s stage plays include: The Trial Of Jesus (2000), Glory Be To The Father (2002), After Luke (2005), When I Was God (2005), The Cure (2005). His plays received critical acclaim in Shanghai, China, when they featured at World Expo Shanghai (2010) and The JUE International Arts Festival Shanghai (2011). The USA premieres were produced at The Irish Repertory Theatre, New York (2009) and the Green Room Theatre, New York (2013). The New York productions were critically acclaimed.

Awarded

– Two Irish National Business To Arts Awards (2000)

– Best Director 1st Irish Theatre Awards New York (2009)

– Best Actor  at 1st Irish Theatre Awards New York (2013)

– Best Actor

– Best Supporting Actor

Nominated

– Irish Times Theatre Awards (2000)

– Best Playwright at 1st Irish Theatre Awards New York (2013)

Creedon has written over 60 hours of original radio drama — broadcast on RTÉ, Lyric FM, BBC, BBC Radio 4 and BBC World Service. His work has achieved recognition in the One Voice Monologue Awards (BBC), The Francis McManus Awards (RTÉ), The PJ O’Connor Awards (RTÉ) and has represented Ireland in the BBC World Service World Play Radio Drama Competition. Critical reviews of Cónal’s radio work include commendations in the Irish Times radio critics list of Best Radio of the Year for 1994 and 1997.

Cónal has produced, written and directed a number of film documentaries: The Burning of Cork (2005), Why the Guns Remained Silent in Rebel Cork (2006), If it’s Spiced Beef (2007), The Boys of Fairhill (2009). His documentary, Flynnie: The Man Who Walked Like Shakespeare (2008) was shortlisted for Focal International Documentary Awards UK London. Creedon’s documentaries were broadcast by RTÉ TV – and had numerous public screenings including at the Irish Pavilion in Shanghai China, during World Expo 2010.

 

Public Readings/Lectures/Workshops

Don't be fretting now about the past gone glories of Irish literary genius since we're lucky to have walking among us Sprachsalz festival [Austria] but heard the man read his work. The brilliance was self-evident and undeniable. The audience were in raptures over the beauty of his sentences and rapier-like wit. He writes about the human condition in ways that find you deep down where you just have to laugh and weep. Read this author and your faith will be restored in both literature and life.    Alan Kaufmann [2016] – Jew Boy, Drunken Angel, The Outlaw Bible Of American Poetry]

The members of the Merriman Summer School were utterly enthralled by Cónal Creedon’s presentation of a selection of his writings - a presentation that was warm, deeply insightful, and so humorous and entertaining about the human condition. He was by far one of the most able speakers at the school.    William J  Smyth, Emeritus Professor of Geography, UCC [2015]

Cónal Creedon gave a tour de force reading of his work as it applies to the theme of 'love and marriage' at the 2015 Merriman Summer School in Ennis, Co. Clare. The audience reacted to Conal's brilliant writing.    Professor Linda Connolly, Director Merriman Summer School [2015]

Cónal Creedon was a massive hit. A festival highlight and I hope he will come back.    Pat McCabe – Flat Lake Festival [2011]

Cónal Creedon brought the house down at this year’s Flat Lake Festival - any comic would envy the laughs he elicited from the audience.    Eoin Butler-Kennedy – The Irish Times [July 2011]

Creedon is a skillful reader…managing to keep the crowd engaged is a challenging feat for many writers who are often able to captivate with the written word [but] less so with the spoken word. Creedon is able to capture the simple moments of people's lives with honesty and humour.    Shanghai International Literary Festival - The Shanghai Daily – Shanghai City Weekend – Trista Marie [Lit. Review THAT’S Shanghai]

Conal Creedon’s reading at the Rock on The Fall’s Road – stole the show and the hearts of everyone who heard him that afternoon. A highlight of the West Belfast Feile.    Danny Morrison – Director of West Belfast Festval  Feile na Phobail.

Photo credit: John Minihan

Helen Cullen is an Irish writer and academic living in England. Her debut novel, The Lost Letters of William Woolf, was published in 2018 by Penguin Random House in the UK and Ireland, published in the USA by Harper Collins in 2019 and in translation to numerous foreign markets. Described as "Enchanting, intriguing, deeply moving" by the Irish Times, the novel garnered Helen a Best Newcomer nomination at the 2018 Irish Book Awards.

Helen's second novel, The Truth Must Dazzle Gradually was published in 2021 by Penguin Random House in Ireland and the UK, by Harper Collins in America and in translation. Described as "a compassionate portrayal of grief" by the Irish Times and "a book of rare quality" by the iPaper, the novel has achieved great critical acclaim.

Helen holds a B.A. Communications from Dublin City University, an M.A. Theatre Studies from University College Dublin and M.A. in English Literature at Brunel University in London and is currently completing a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia. She is also a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at Brunel University, London. Helen also works as a literary critic for the Irish Times newspaper and writes for the Sunday Times Magazine in the UK.

You can find Helen on Twitter as @wordsofhelen and at www.helencullen.ie

Celia de Fréine writes in many genres in both Irish and English. Born in Newtownards, County Down, she now divides her time between Dublin and Connemara. Awards for her poetry include the Patrick Kavanagh Award and Gradam Litríochta Chló Iar-Chonnacht. To date she has published eight collections, the most recent of which are cuir amach seo dom : riddle me this (Arlen House, 2014), Blood Debts (Scotus Press, 2014) and A lesson in Can’t (Scotus Press, 2014). Her plays have won numerous Oireachtas awards and are performed regularly.

Her film and television scripts have won awards in Ireland and America. Her screenplay for the film Marathon was given the award for best screenplay at the New York International Film Festival in 2009. The short film Rian : Trace which she conceived and wrote was given the award for best international narrative short at the same festival in 2010.

Ceannródaí (LeabhairCOMHAR, 2018) her biography of Louise Gavan Duffy won ACIS Duais Leabhar Taighde na Bliana (2019) and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards (2018) and Gradam Uí Shuilleabháin (2019). Cur i gCéill, her first thriller, was published by LeabhairCOMHAR in 2019. 

Photo credit: 'Le caoinchead thogra Phortráidí na Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge. 

Sharon Dempsey is a Northern Irish based writer. Her new novel The Midnight Killing, published by Avon Harper Collins, is out now. The first in the series, Who took Eden Mulligan?, came out in 2021 and is available now in the US, and both books have been sold for translation rights in the Czech region. She is undertaking a creative-critical PhD at Queen's University Belfast, exploring the victim and the role of the body, with reference to class and gender in Northern Irish crime fiction. The novels explored in her corpus represent contemporary Northern Ireland, often negotiating trauma from the recent past, and operate within the subgenres of the police procedural, domestic noir.

The PhD creative component takes the form of a novel, in the sub-genre of the domestic noir. It is called After the Party and is in part inspired and informed by the highly publicised account of the Belfast Rape trial of 2018, which involved four Ulster rugby players.

As an undergraduate student she studied Politics and English at Queen's University and went on to study newspaper journalism at City University, London.  She was a journalist and health writer before turning to writing crime fiction and has written for a variety of publications and newspapers, including the Irish Times. Sharon is an experienced creative writing facilitator. She has published five novels and three non-fiction books. Sharon has many short stories published in anthologies, literary journals magazines and broadcast on radio.

She was awarded the Miss Margaret Cuthbert Frazer Research Bursary by Queen's University in 2021 and has shared her work at many international conferences.

Author and journalist Martina Devlin has written 10 books. Her latest is Truth & Dare, a short story collection in which she brings to life some of the women who shaped Ireland – from Maud Gonne to Countess Markievicz to Hanna Sheehy Skeffington. Her novels include About Sisterland set in the future in a world ruled by women, The House Where It Happened about Ireland’s last witchcraft trial (optioned for film) and Ship of Dreams about the Titanic disaster, with which she has a family connection.

Her work has won a number of prizes including the Royal Society of Literature's VS Pritchett Memorial Prize and a Hennessy Literary Prize, while she has been shortlisted three times for the Irish Book Awards. She writes a weekly current affairs column for the Irish Independent and has been named National Newspapers of Ireland commentator of the year. She is vice-chair of the Irish Writers Centre and a PhD candidate at Trinity College Dublin researching Somerville and Ross.

Moyra Donaldson is a poet from Newtownards, Co Down. She has published eight collections of poetry, Snakeskin Stilettos, Beneath the Ice, The Horse’s Nest and Miracle Fruit, from Lagan Press, Belfast and an American edition of Snakeskin Stilettos, from Cavan Kerry Press, New Jersey which was short listed for a Foreword Book of the Year Award. Her awards include the Women’s National Poetry Competition, The Allingham Award, Cuirt New Writing Award, North West Words Poetry Award and the Belfast Year of the Writer Award.

Her Selected Poems was published in 2012 by Liberties Press, Dublin, and The Goose Tree was published in 2014, also from Liberties Press.

She is also widely published in magazines, journals and anthologies in both Europe, Australia and the USA. A previous project was a collaboration with photographic artist Victoria J Dean resulting in an exhibition and the publication Abridged 0 -36 Dis-Ease.

Her poems have featured on BBC Radio and television and on American national radio and television and she has read at festivals in Europe, Canada and America.

Her most recent project is a collaboration with artist Paddy Lennon, Blood Horses, a limited edition publication of artworks and poems published in September 2018. Blood Horses tells the stories of The Byerley Turk, Darley Arabian and Godolphin Barb, the three founding stallions of the thoroughbred horse. It also explores the profound link between humans and horses.

Carnivorous is her new collection from Doire Press 2019.

Moyra is a Creative Writing facilitator with twenty-five years’ experience and an editor and mentor, both freelance and for literary organisations. She is particularly interested in helping individuals to find their own voice and believes in encouraging both inspiration and craft in the writing process. Supportive in their design, Moyra’s classes also encourage personal and creative development. She has a wide-ranging knowledge of the literary scene, outlets for publication and other opportunities. 

Native of Tullamore, the author Neil Donnelly has had three plays, The Silver Dollar Boys, Upstarts, and The Duty Master, performed at the Abbey Theatre. He was Writer-in-Residence in Mayo in 1993/94, Writer-in-Association, Abbey Theatre, Dublin in 1995.

His debut poetry collection, Tullamore Train, was published in 2012. He is the producer of Stories For The Ear, an extensive collection of narratives featuring writers from County Kildare, and has recently produced and directed Where Would You Like This Bullet? a 90 minute biopic of acclaimed Irish author Aidan Higgins. He is a member of the Irish Academy of Letters and Aosdána.

Photo credit: Carmel Hennessy

 

Born in Dublin in 1969, Emma Donoghue is an award-winning writer based in Canada. Her international bestseller Room won the Rogers Writers Trust and Commonwealth Prizes and was a finalist for the Man Booker and Orange; the film earned her Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA nominations. Donoghue co-wrote the Netflix film The Wonder based on her novel. Her other books include Haven, The Pull of the Stars, Akin, Frog Music, The Sealed Letter, and The Lotterys series. Her novel Learned by Heart (2023) is about Anne Lister, inspiration for HBO/BBC’s Gentleman Jack.

Photo credit: Mark Raynes Roberts

Gerard Donovan was born in Wexford, Ireland, and grew up in Galway. He graduated from NUI and the John Hopkins Writing Seminars. His debut novel Schopenhauer's Telescope (2003) was long-listed for the Man Booker prize, his third novel, Julius Winsome, currently available in over a dozen languages, is soon to be a major motion picture. His next publication was a collection of short stories set in Ireland, followed by a novel set in early twentieth-century Europe which he is currently writing.

Theo Dorgan was born in Cork in 1953. He is a poet, novelist, prose writer, documentary screenwriter, editor, translator and broadcaster.

His poetry collections include The Ordinary House of Love (Galway, Salmon Poetry, 1991); Rosa Mundi (Salmon Poetry, 1995); and Sappho's Daughter (Dublin, Wave Train Press 1998). Days Like These (with Tony Curtis and Paula Meehan) was published in 2007 by Brooding Heron Press, Waldron Island WA, in the USA. In 2008 Dedalus Press, Dublin, published What This Earth Cost Us, reprinting Dorgan’s first two collections with some amendments. After Greek (Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2010), his most recent collections are Nine Bright Shiners (Dedalus Press 2014) and Orpheus (Dedalus Press 2018). Songs of Earth and Light, his versions from the Slovenian of Barbara Korun, appeared in 2005 (Cork, Southword Editions). In 2015 his translations from the French of the Syrian poet Maral al-Masri, Barefoot Souls, appeared from ARC Publications, UK and a further collection of translations of al-Masri, Liberty Goes Naked was published in 2017 by Southword Editions, Cork. ‘Bailéid Giofógacha’, his Irish language translations of Lorca’s ‘Romancero Gitano’, has just been published by Coiscéim in Dublin.

He has published a selected poems in Italian, La Casa Ai Margini del Mondo, (Faenza, Moby Dick, 1999), and an Italian translation of Greek appeared as Ellenica from Edizioni Colibris, Ferrara, in 2011. From the same publisher came Nove Lucenti Corpi Celesti (2017), a translation of Nine Bright ShinersLa Hija de Safo,a Spanish translation of Sappho's Daughter was published by Poesía Hiperión, Madrid, in 2001.)

His prose account of a transatlantic crossing under sail, Sailing for Home, was published by Penguin Ireland in 2004, and was subsequently re-published by Dedalus Press. In the same year, his libretto Jason and the Argonauts, to music by Howard Goodall, was commissioned by and premiered at The Royal Albert Hall, London — the text was published in book form by Wavetrain Press, Dublin, in 2014. A further prose book on sailing, Time on the Ocean, A Voyage from Cape Horn to Cape Town, was published by New Island, Dublin, in 2010. His first novel, Making Way was published by New Island Books in 2013.

He has editedThe Great Book of Ireland/Leabhar Mór na hÉireann (with Gene Lambert, 1991); Revising the Rising (with Máirín Ní Dhonnachadha, Field Day, Derry,1991); Irish Poetry since Kavanagh (Dublin, Four Courts Press, 1996); Watching the River Flow (with Noel Duffy, Dublin, Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann, 1999); An Leabhar Mór/ The Great Book of Gaelic (with Malcolm Maclean, Edinburgh, Canongate, 2002); The Book of Uncommon Prayer (Dublin, Penguin Ireland, 2007), La Paume Ouverte (Dublin, Poetry Ireland/Éigse Eireann, 2010); What We Found There (Dublin, Dedalus Press, 2013). He was the editor of the collection of essays,Foundation Stone: Notes Towards a Constitution for a 21st Century Republic (New Island Books, 2014). He has been series editor of the European Poetry Translation Network publications and Director of the collective translation seminars from which the books arose.

A former Director of Poetry Ireland/Éigse Éireann, he has worked extensively as a broadcaster of literary programmes on both radio and television. He was presenter of Poetry Now on RTÉ Radio 1, and later presented RTÉ’s TV books programme, Imprint. Among his awards are the Listowel Prize for Poetry, 1992, The O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Poetry 2010 and the Irish Times Poetry Now Prize in 2015. He served on The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon 2003 -2008. He lives in Dublin.

Rita Duffy was born in 1959 in Belfast. She received a B.A. at the Art & Design Centre and a M.A. in Fine Art at the University of Ulster. She is one of Northern Ireland's groundbreaking artists who began her work concentrating primarily on the figurative/narrative tradition. Her art is often autobiographical, including themes and images of Irish identity, history and politics. Duffy’s work has grown and evolved but remains intensely personal with overtones of the surreal. Homage is paid to the language of magic realism and always there is exquisite crafting of materials.

She has initiated several major collaborative art projects and was made an Honorary Member of the R.S.U.A. for her developmental work within the built environment. Her work is increasingly shown in solo and group exhibitions around the world. She is an associate at Goldsmiths College, London working on an artistic exchange with Argentina and Northern Ireland. Her Belfast studio practice continues to develop and her public art projects are increasingly preoccupied with international themes. Currently she holds a Leverhulme Fellowship with the Transitional Justice Institute, looking at the role art has in post conflict societies. Duffy’s work is being increasingly collected at home and abroad with work in numerous public and private collections. To date she has achieved a long list of awards, "medals" and bursaries for her public and privately commissioned work.

Catherine Dunne is the author of ten published novels including The Things We Know Now, which won the 700th anniversary Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 and was shortlisted for the Eason Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. She has also published one work of non-fiction: a social history of Irish immigrants in London in the nineteen-fifties, called An Unconsidered People. Catherine’s novels have been short-listed for, among others, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award and the Italian Booksellers’ Prize.  Her work has been translated into several languages. She was recently long-listed for the first Laureate for Irish Fiction Award. Catherine Dunne’s most recent publication, a novel entitled The Years That Followed, was published in 2016. It was long listed for the International Dublin Literary Award 2018. Catherine Dunne lives in Dublin.

Photo by Noel Hillis, https://www.noelhillis.ie/index

Anne Enright was born in Dublin, where she now lives and works. She has written seven novels, including The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize. Her latest novel, Actress, was published in 2020. Enright has written two collections of short stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather (2009) and a book of non-fiction called Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood (2004). 

She won the Irish Novel of the Year twice, in 2008 and in 2015. In the same year Enright was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish fiction. 

Wendy Erskine's two prize-winning collections of short stories, Sweet Home and Dance Move are published by The Stinging Fly Press / Picador. Her writing has been listed for The Gordon Burn Prize, The Edge Hill Prize and The Republic of Consciousness Prize, among others. She also writes about art and culture. She edited a book of writing on art and the home, well I just kind of like it, for Paper Visual Art Books. In 2022 she was a Seamus Heaney Fellow at Queen's University. 

 

Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland and she lectures at The National University of Ireland, Galway. Feeney has published three collections of poetry including The Radio was Gospel and Rise. She wrote the award-winning piece for the Liz Roche Company, WRoNGHEADED and her short story Sojourn was included in The Art of The Glimpse, 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad Gleeson. Feeney has published widely, most recently in Poetry Review, Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, Copper Nickel Journal, The Guardian, The Irish Times and Oxford Poetry.

Her debut novel As You Were won the 2021 Kate O’ Brien award and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, Rathbones Folio Prize and was an Observer Best Debut of 2020. As You Were featured in various Best of 2020 lists including The Telegraph, Herald (Scotland), Irish Independent, Evening Standard, Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times, Foyles and Irish Times. She was chosen by The Observer as a top debut novelist for 2020. Feeney works on Creative Writing and Community Output on the Tuam Oral History Project at the National University of Ireland, Galway, archiving the first-person histories and narrative from this time.

Photo Credit: Julia Monard

Maurice Fitzpatrick is a film director and lecturer from Ireland who was educated in Trinity College Dublin. He lived in Japan 2004-11. He has made two documentary films for the BBC: The Boys of St. Columb's (also an RTÉ production) which tells the story of the first generation of children to receive free secondary education as a result of the ground-breaking 1947 Education Act in Northern Ireland, whose participants included St. Columbs' Nobelists John Hume and Seamus Heaney; and a second film for the BBC, an examination of Brian Friel's play, Translations which shows how Translations came to spearhead a cultural movement in both Northern and Southern Ireland to achieve a measure of cultural pluralism in advance of a political settlement. In 2017, he wrote, directed and produced a documentary feature film, In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America, which is a feature documentary which includes interviews with President Bill Clinton, President Jimmy Carter, many US Senators and Congressmen, as well as Irish leaders and British Prime Ministers Tony Blair and John Major. Inspired by Martin Luther King, rising from the riot-torn streets of Northern Ireland to enlist American Presidents from Carter to Clinton, this is the story of the extraordinary work of Nobel Prize-winner John Hume to harness and leverage US support to help to secure peace in Ireland. Narrated by Liam Neeson and scored by Bill Whelan, the film chronicles John Hume’s approach to politics in Northern Ireland in co-ordination with senior political figures in the US.  John Hume in America has been has been welcomed by Thomas O Neill, former Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, as ‘the most succinct narrative on the history of Northern Ireland spanning from Bloody Sunday to the Good Friday Agreement’. The film has screened at over twenty film festivals and at four parliaments. He is also the author of a book entitled John Hume in America (Irish Academic Press. 2017; University of Notre Dame Press 2019), launched by Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. He is Poynter Fellow at Yale University. 

Olivia Fitzsimons is a writer, originally from Nothern Ireland now living in Wicklow. 

Her debut novel, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop, (John Murray Press April 2022) was shortlisted for the 2022 Butler Literary Award. She is a current Dean Arts Studio Resident in Dublin and the recipient of the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris/Literature Ireland Residency for May 2023. As part of the Irish Writers Centre Evolution Programme she was selected to teach for a semester delivering classes to First Year BA Creative Writing Students in National University Galway and has given Master Classes for University College Cork, and spoken at a wide range of Literary Festivals and Online Literary Events. Olivia has been awarded grants from the Arts Council of Ireland and Northern Ireland for her writing, and her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, The Cormorant and broadcast on BBC Radio 4, Short Works. She has a BA in History from Trinity College Dublin and spent her Erasmus year abroad at the Rijksuniversiteit in Groningen. After working in advertising in London she returned to Dublin to complete an MA in Film from DIT and worked in film production for several years. She has several screenplays in development and is currently working on a second novel.

Find out more about Olivia Fitzsimons on her Website or through Linktree

 

Mia Gallagher is the critically acclaimed author of two novels: HellFire (Penguin, 2006), awarded the Irish Tatler Literature Award 2007, and Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (New Island, 2016), longlisted for the 2016 Republic of Consciousness Award. Her debut short-story collection, Shift (New Island, 2018) includes ‘Polyfilla’, recently shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Book Awards.

Mia’s short fiction has previously been anthologised and published in Ireland and abroad, shortlisted for Hennessy (1991) and Bowen/Trevor (2011) awards and awarded the START 2005 Chapbook Award. Her reviews, articles and essays have been published in the Irish Times, The Guardian, The Stinging Fly, Architecture Ireland and Circa, amongst others. Collaborations include Electric Blanket, a sound installation with composer Jack Cawley and theatre-maker Ciarán Taylor; Ya Slip Ta Bang, a sonic bike project with UK artist Kaffe Matthews, based on the text of HellFire; and ‘Library Thing’, an essay for Dublin’s Goethe Institut Library, available online and as a single-edition hand-crafted book. As a theatre artist, Mia’s work has toured nationally in Ireland and travelled to the Czech Republic, Italy, Greece, France and the UK.

Mia has enjoyed the role of writer-in-residence in many different contexts, at home and abroad. She has received several Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and is a contributing editor to the Stinging Fly. In 2018, she was elected as a member of Aosdána, an affiliate of Irish artists recognised for their contribution to Irish culture and society. She was also the inaugural Writer-in-Residence with the Leuven Centre of Irish Studies in March 2019. 

Photo credit: Robbie Fry

Ruth Gilligan is an Irish novelist and academic now based in the UK where she works as a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She has published five novels to date including, most recently, The Butchers, which won the 2021 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, awarded to the book that best captures the spirit of a place.

Photo credit: Paul Musso

Nicky Gogan is a graduate of the National College of Art and Design Ireland and of EAVE 2008. In her college days, Nicky became involved in the dance music scene in the early 90's running club events in Dublin. This experience sparked an interest in collective collaboration with a community ethos, which led to her early practice of process filmmaking. The friends Nicky met and subsequently collaborated with (and many more along the way), have enabled her to spearhead numerous cultural events and organisations over the years, such as; Sink Digital Media, Darklight Digital Film Festival, DATA (Dublin Art And Technology Association), Wildlight Channel, Exhibit series at The Digital Hub, Offline Animation Residency and Still Films, where Nicky has been writing, producing, editing and directing animations, artist films, dramas and documentaries over the past 15 years (www.stillfilms.org).

Nicky’s love of animation has always been a strong theme in her curatorial and programming practice and now makes up a big part of her creative output in her work as executive producer and head of development at animation studio Piranha Bar, where she is co-creator on her first TV series IRL with NCAD classmate and creative director Gavin Kelly (piranhabar.ie). IRL marries animation and live-action on-screen while embracing retroscripting as part of the writing process - keeping creative collaboration at the project’s core.

Nicky’s current work at Still Films embraces her roots in documentary, where she most recently produced Vivienne Dick's film, New York Our Time. Nicky is currently working on a new body of work with long time creative collaborator Paul Rowley, a trilogy of thematically linked real-life stories from the past - harnessing their documentary sensibilities into works of scripted fiction.

(c) photo by Bríd O'Donovan

Hugo Hamilton was born the child of German-Irish parents in Dublin, Ireland, in 1953. He only attended schools where the teaching took place in his father's language, Gaelic. As the family spoke no English at home – Hamilton spoke German with his mother –, he learnt the language in which he writes today on the streets. Before he began writing short stories and novels, he worked as a journalist and travelled widely throughout Europe.

To date, Hamilton has published five novels and a collection of short stories. Three of the novels are set in Germany and reflect – determined by the influence of both German and Irish culture – the viewpoint of an outsider. His double cultural background, his "dual" identity have led Hamilton to become one of the "European" voices of his generation. His mother's death stimulated Hamilton to investigate – in "war-love" – his "divided identity" and the "almost-fiction of his own Germanness". Hugo is a member of Aosdána and has been awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany) for his unique contribution to literature and understanding between Germany and Ireland. He also won the Prix Femina étranger and the Premio Giuseppe Berto in 2004. 

Photo credit: Marc O'Sullivan 

Son of musicians, Steafán Hanvey hails from Downpatrick in Northern Ireland. Performance was also part of school-life, where his teachers would have him sing ballads of immigration, lost love, and blooming heather to his classmates. Throughout this time, his ears were also filled with the music of Joni Mitchell, Van Morrison, Makem & Clancy, Tommy Sands, Simon & Garfunkel, Nina Simone, Willie Nelson, and Bob Dylan. Rock music filled his early teen years, and by 16, he felt ready to front his first band, 50/50 – a heavy rock outfit – where he was joined by his childhood friends, Kenny & Carl Papenfus (later of Relish fame).

After three years with the band, Steafán took time out to attend university. As an exchange-student, his third year brought him to Seattle where he studied sound-engineering, produced demos for local bands, and witnessed the birth of grunge.

In the summer of 1995, love and further studies brought him to Helsinki, Finland. Working with Janne Viksten, one of Finland’s most celebrated engineers, he recorded a mini-album, Sole, which dealt with falling in love, falling on your ass, and picking yourself back up … in order to fail better the next time. After intensive gigging around Finland, Steafán looked west again. He relocated to Dublin, and in 2004 played NYC and Montreal. The following year, he played at Boston’s NEMO music festival. Meanwhile, back in Europe, he was opening for acts such as The Hothouse Flowers and Relish.

In 2006, he released his debut album, Steafán Hanvey and The HoneyMoon Junkies. (This was mixed by Kieran Lynch who had worked on U2’s How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb and Elvis Costello’s When I Was Cruel. The album was then mastered in London by Jon Astley, who had worked with the likes of The Who, George Harrison, and Norah Jones.)

The release of The HoneyMoon Junkies led to national television and radio appearances. The singles “A Hundred Days of Snow” and “My Woman” received strong airplay in Ireland and Finland. HOTPRESS, Ireland’s leading music publication, called Steafán’s debut: “a rare delight”, and opined that it was of an “impressive quality” with “song-craft … shot through with a wide-eyed optimism”. “A Hundred Days of Snow” was “an uplifting swirl of dissonance and sunshine”. The Irish Times noted that “Steafán’s voice oozes warmth and a confessional charm”, while his album was “a lean, longing collection”. Daily Ireland called it “remarkable” and that “the beautiful clarity of his voice was bewitching”. Gerry Anderson of the BBC remarked that “Steafán has earned his place at the table.”

The critical acclaim for The Honeymoon Junkies encouraged Steafán to focus on audience-building in North America. Five tours saw him perform in the Rockwood Music Hall, Pete’s Candy Store, Arlene’s Grocery in NY, and also at the Lizard Lounge, Club Passim, and Showcase Live in MA. He also headlined at Chicago’s Uncommon Ground and Elbo Room.

In February 2013, Steafán released his sophomore album Nuclear Family (eOne) in the USA & Canada. It’s a collection of ten songs that reflects on the constructive and destructive forces inherent in most normal families. (Recorded in Paris, Helsinki, Dublin and mixed by Franz Ferdinand & The Cardigans producer, Tore Johansson, who has also worked with Martha Wainwright & New Order, the record was mastered in London by Mandy “The Exchange” Parnell (Feist/Nick Cave/Bonnie Prince Billy), and features guest appearances by Liam Ó Maonlaí (Hothouse Flowers), Bertrand Belin, Jukka Jylli, and the Papenfus brothers, Carl & Ken of Relish.)

In tandem with the release of Nuclear Family, Steafán launched Look Behind You! ™ – a multi-media project that details how a father and son have negotiated the personal and political landscapes of Northern Ireland. Melding image and voice, anecdote and memory, it showcases his father’s prize-winning photojournalism along with radio-edits of his interviews with some of Northern Ireland’s best-known figures. These are complemented and contextualised by Steafán’s songs and story-telling. To date, Look Behind You! ™ has been performed to critical-acclaim in over thirty academic institutions in the USA, Canada, and Europe. Steafán puts its success down to the fact that the audience is intrigued by how the project “conflates the public and the private, and dares to promote the maxim that the end of art is peace. Basically, although I have never written explicitly about Northern Ireland, Northern Ireland has written me. Funny that.”

Photo credit: Bobbie Hanvey

Anne Haverty's first novel One Day As A Tiger (1997) has been described variously as 'a brilliant depiction of rural life' (Literary Review), a 'work of rare enchantment' (Sunday Telegraph), 'brimming with confidence and originality' (New Statesman) and 'A work of heroic imagination, huge and Dostoevsian'.  A tragi-comedy about an unlikely sheep farmer and his love for a genetically modified lamb and for his brother's wife, it won the Rooney Prize and was shortlisted for the Whitbread (Costa).

The Far Side Of A Kiss (2000) is very different though it too is concerned with the pathos of love. Set in London in 1820 it is based on Liber Amoris, in which the writer William Hazlitt described his obsessive and bitter infatuation with the girl Sarah Walker. In The Far Side Of A Kiss Sarah is rescued from silence and obscurity to give her side of the affair. Sad though her story is, Sarah tells it with 'an extraordinary lightness of touch and considerable wit'. The Far Side Of A Kiss was long-listed for the Booker. 

The Free And Easy (2006) is an ironic portrayal of the Ireland that flourished in the early years of this century. It was the time of the Celtic Tiger when Ireland, along with much of the rest of the western world, experienced an unprecedented prosperity fuelled by easy credit - and loved every minute of it! Into this dazzled-by-itself world comes Tom Blessman, a naive American and emissary of his knowing but equally naive grand-uncle to play out a tragi-comic role. 'A subtle, funny and mordant take on Ireland past and present from one of the country's most stylish contemporary writers.'

The poetry collection The Beauty Of The Moon (1999) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. "A singing voice for 'our dejected age'" (Derek Mahon)

A Break In the Journey (2018), poems. 'Here is a poet with the savoir-faire, sophistication and accomplishment to let a poem be...' (Paul Perry).

'Has a real freedom and lightness' (John McAuliffe)

A new version of her classic biography of Constance Markievicz, titled Irish Revolutionary, was issued in 2016.

Anne Haverty's teaching positions have included Visiting Professor at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan and Writing Fellow at TCD and she reviews regularly for national newspapers.

Born in Tipperary she was educated at TCD and the Sorbonne and is a member of Aosdána. A new novel, Fidelity, is forthcoming.

Photo credit: David Travers 

Neil Hegarty grew up in Derry. His novels include The Jewel, described by the Irish Times as ‘a vital book for our time’, and Inch Levels, which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year award in 2017.

Neil’s non-fiction titles include Frost: That Was the Life That Was, a biography of David Frost; The Secret History of our Streets, which tells the story of twentieth-century London; and The Story of Ireland, which accompanies the BBC television history of Ireland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Tangerine and elsewhere; he is a regular literary reviewer with the Irish Times; and is co-editor with Nora Hickey M’Sichili of the essay collection Impermanence, published by No Alibis and recently adapted for radio by RTE.

Neil lives in Dublin.

Photo credit: Ger Holland 

Seán Hewitt is a poet and academic. He won an Eric Gregory Award in 2019, the Resurgence Prize in 2017, and a Northern Writers' Award in 2016. His debut collection of poems Tongues of Fire (Jonathan Cape, 2020) won The Laurel Prize, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award.

He is also a book critic for The Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. His book, J.M. Synge: Nature, Politics, Modernism, is published with Oxford University Press in 2021.

His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is forthcoming from Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the USA in 2022. 

Photo Credit: Bríd O'Donovan

Peter Hollywood was twenty-one when his first short story ‘The Accident’ was accepted by the famed editor David Marcus for his New Irish Writing page in the Irish Press. The story was short-listed for that year’s Hennessy literary prize. Marcus went on to include another story, ‘The Dog’, in the anthology State of the Art: Short Stories by New Irish Writers (Hodder and Stoughton, 1992) which included stories by such acclaimed writers as Anne Enright, Maeve Binchy and John Banville. Peter Hollywood is the author of Jane Alley, Pretani Press (1987); Lead City and Other Stories, Lagan Press (2002); Luggage – a novel, Lagan Press (2008); Hawks and Other Short Stories (2013) Drowning the Gowns – a Novel (2016) both published by New Island Books, and The Welcome Centre (December 2022), Arlen House.  His stories have appeared in numerous journals, and he has had stories represented in three further anthologies: 'Krino - An Anthology of Modern Irish Writing' edited by Gerald Dawe and Jonathan Williams, published by Gill and MacMillan; Belfast Stories, Doire Press and The New Frontier: Contemporary Writing From & About the Irish Border, New Island Books. In September 2021, he had a specially commissioned story broadcast in the ‘Short Works’ series on BBC Radio 4. Peter was recently the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow in Seamus Heaney Centre, QUB. His new collection of stories, The Welcome Centre (Arlen House) was launched 26th of January 2023 in QUB. The story ‘Punished by Appointment’ was on the long list for An Post Short Story of the Year.

Eleanor Hooker is an Irish poet and writer. Her third poetry collection Of Ochre and Ash (Dedalus Press) is the recipient of the 2022 Michael Hartnett Award. Her other two collections with the Dedalus Press are A Tug of Blue and her debut The Shadow Owner's Companion, which was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award for the Best First Irish Collection 2012. Her chapbook Legion (Bonnefant Press, Netherlands) was published in 2021. A 2021 recipient of the Markievicz Award, her poetry book for that award, Where Memory Lies, is due for publication by Bonnefant Press in 2023. Eleanor's poetry has been published internationally in Ireland, UK, USA, Holland, Romania, Hungary, India, Australia and Italy (forthcoming). Her work has appeared in literary journals including Poetry Ireland Review, POETRYPoetry Review, PN ReviewAgenda, The North, The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, New Hibernia Review, New England Review (forthcoming 2023), Archipelago (forthcoming 2023). Eleanor is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Limerick. She holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin, an MA (Hons) in Cultural History from the University of Northumbria, and a BA (Hons 1st) from the Open University. Eleanor is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London (FLS). She's a helm and Press Officer for Lough Derg RNLI Lifeboat. She began her career as an Intensive Care Nurse and trained as a midwife at the National Maternity Hospital, Dublin.

Website:  www.eleanorhooker.com

 

Photo credit: George Hooker

Caoilinn Hughes' latest novel, The Wild Laughter (2020) won the Royal Society of Literature's Encore Award. It was also shortlisted for the An Post Irish Book Awards' Novel of the Year and RTÉ Radio 1 Listener's Choice Award 2020, the Dalkey Literary Awards, and was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her first novel Orchid & The Wasp (2018) won the Collyer Bristow Prize 2019, and was a finalist for four other prizes. Her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Irish Times Strong/Shine Award. Her short fiction has been awarded The Moth Short Story Prize 2018, the An Post Irish Book Awards' Story of the Year 2020, and an O.Henry Prize in 2019. She was the 2021 Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin. Her third novel is forthcoming in early 2024.

Photo credit: Donnla Hughes 

 

Michael Hughes was born and raised near the border in Northern Ireland. After a degree in English at Oxford, he studied theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris, and has worked as an actor for many years, under the professional name Michael Colgan. He currently teaches Creative Writing at Queen Mary, University of London. His first novel The Countenance Divine was published in 2016, followed in 2018 by Country, which won the London Hellenic Prize, and was shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature and the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. It was also chosen as a Book of the Year in the Guardian, TLS and New Statesman. 

Photo Credit: Sarah Laverton

Matthew Jacobson is an Irish drummer, improviser, composer, educator and producer. He is a full-time jazz lecturer at Dublin City University and holds a PhD from Ulster University. He is also a Fulbright Scholar, co-director of independent Irish record label Diatribe and has received numerous awards and scholarships from institutions including Arts Council of Ireland, Music Network, Berklee College of Music and Dun Laoghaire-Rathdown County Council.

As well as leading his own groups ReDiviDeR and Insufficient Funs, he coleads Roamer – a quartet of Ireland's most internationally recognised improvisers – and regularly tours, performs and records with leading creative musicians around the world. 

Photo credit: Steven Cropper

Biddy Jenkinson writes, when she can; gardens, paints and whistles( badly) when she can't. She lives, when possible, in a house, on a hill in Wicklow. The surrounding field is filled with plants and shrubs, to suit bees - bumble bees in particular - and birds.

She is grateful to Coiscéim for publishing several books of her poetry, the latest 'Sceilg na Scál' in 2017. Coiscéim has also published three collections of  her short stories. Two of these collections are detective stories imagining, as detective, An tAthair Pádraig Ó Duinnín, compiler of the Irish Texts Society's Foclóir Gaeilge agus Béarla.

Her plays have won prizes and have - less often - been staged. She would like to mention Aisling Ghéar,  Belfast; Aisteoirí an Spidéil, Conamara; Lab na Mainistreach, Daingean Uí Chúis; Guthanna Binne Síoraí, Dublin as companies to which she is indebted.

She has no taste for writing - however fine - that adds to the world reserve of gloom. Her own ambition is to pull the devil by the tail and get away with it.

Rosemary Jenkinson was born in Belfast and is a playwright and short story writer. She has taught English in Athens, Nancy, Prague and Warsaw. Her plays include The Bonefire (winner of the 2006 Stewart Parker BBC Radio Award), Johnny Meister + The StitchBasra BoyWhite Star of the NorthPlanet BelfastHere Comes the NightMichelle and Arlene, May the Road Rise Up and Lives in Translation. She was the 2017 artist-in-residence at the Lyric Theatre Belfast and 2010 writer-on-attachment at the National Theatre Studio in London. Her plays have been performed in Belfast, Dublin, London, Edinburgh, New York and Washington DC.

Her collections of short stories are Contemporary Problems Nos. 53 & 54 (Lagan Press 2004), Aphrodite’s Kiss (Whittrick Press 2016), Catholic Boy (Doire Press 2018), Lifestyle Choice 10mgs (Doire Press, 2020) and Marching Season (Arlen House, 2021). The Irish Times singled out Catholic Boy for ‘an elegant wit, terrific characterization and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast’. Stories have also appeared in The Stinging FlyThe Fish Anthology and The Glass Shore

Writing for radio includes Castlereagh to Kandahar (BBC Radio 3) and TheBlackthorn Tree (BBC Radio 4). 

Essays on the nature of writing, Northern Irish identity and women’s writing have appeared in Female LinesThe Irish Times and on BBC World Service. She received the 2018/19 Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

Photo credit: Jim Corr

Oisín Kearney is a writer and director for stage and screen. 

His one-man play, "My Left Nut", co-wrote with Michael Patrick and produced as part of "Show in a Bag" programme, was nominated for the Best Show Under One Houre at the Dublin Fringe Awards and won a Summerhall Lustrum Award at the Edinburgh Fringe. Kearney and Patrick also adapted the play into a 3x30' television series for BBC Three. Their second play, "The Alternative" won the Fishamble's A Play for Ireland initiative. 

Oisín directed the short documentaries "All For Show", "Bbeyond", "Borderlands", "Unfinished Revolution". The documentary "BOJAYÁ: Caught In The Crossfire" was his first feature as Director and it premiered at Hot Docs Film Festival in 2019.

Oisín is one of 16 writers involved in BBC writers room’s “Belfast Voices”, developing talent in Northern Ireland. 

https://www.curtisbrown.co.uk/client/ois-c3-adn-kearney 

Photo Credit: Johnny Frazer

Claire Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as 'compelling ... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed and by 2012's The Devil I Know. Educated at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin and is currently working on her fifth novel.

Photo credit: Magda Christie 

Deirdre Kinahan is an award-winning playwright. She is an elected member of Aosdána, Ireland's elected organisation of outstanding artists and Literary Associate with Meath County Council Arts Office. Deirdre collaborates with artists and theatres all over the world and has a large canon of regularly produced plays to her credit. She is published by Nick Hern Books.

Best Known Plays include: The Unmanageable Sisters, Rathmines Road, Moment, Halcyon Days, Bogboy, Hue & Cry, Melody, Spinning and her Irish Revolutionary Trilogy Wild Sky, Embargo and Outrage. Deirdre works regularly with the Abbey Theatre, Landmark Productions and Fishamble Theatre Company in Ireland.

She also collaborates regularly with theatres in the UK (Bush, Old Vic, Pentabus, Royal Court), Europe (Stat Theatre Mainz, Ateneum Warsaw) and America (Irish Arts Centre, Solas Nua, Manhattan Theatre Club, Steep Theatre, Irish Theatre Chicago).

Recent works include An Old Song Half Forgotten for the Abbey Theatre & Sofft productions, The Saviour for Landmark Productions, In the Middle of the Fields for Solas Nua Washington DC, The Visit for Draiocht & Dublin Theatre Festival, Bloody Yesterday for Glassmask Theatre.

Deirdre has a number of new Theatre Projects in development, she also has years of experience as a producer and enjoys curating or participating in multi-genre artistic projects.

Photo credit: Pat Redmond

Alice Kinsella is a writer from Mayo. She is the author of poetry pamplet Sexy Fruit (Broken Sleep, 2018), and her prose debut Milk (Picador, 2023) received critical acclaim. She edited Empty House: poetry and prose on the climate crisis (Doire Press, 2021). Her poetry has been translated into Polish, Arabic, and Greek. Her poetry films have been screened in Australia, Greece, USA, and Iraq. She has spoken at dozens of literary festivals including Listowel Writers Week, International Literary Festival Dublin, Cuirt, Nottingham Poetry Festival, and Dublin Book Festival. Through the Irish Writers Centre's Evolution Programme, she taught on the BA in Creative Writing at University of Galway. She is an Arts Council Next Generation Artist. Her debut full-length poetry collection, The Ethics of Cats, will be published in 2024. 

Photo credit: Magda Horodecka

 

 

Caitriona Lally has published two novels, Eggshells (2015) and Wunderland (2021). Eggshells was shortlisted for the Newcomer Award at the Irish Book Awards and the Kate O'Brien Debut Novel Award. In 2018, Lally won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Lannan Literary Fellowship for Fiction in 2019. She was the inaugural Rooney Writer Fellow at the Trinity Long Room Hub in 2022. She works as a cleaner in Trinity College Dublin.

Photo credit: Eoin Rafferty

Born in Limerick, Paul Lynch is the author of three internationally acclaimed novels — Red Sky in Morning, published in 2013, finalist for France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger (Best Foreign Book Prize); The Black Snow (2014), winner of the French booksellers’ prize Prix Libr’à Nous for Best Foreign Novel and the inaugural Prix des Lecteurs Privat; and Grace, winner of the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2018 and a finalist for the Walter Scott Prize and the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. 

His fourth novel, Beyond The Sea, was published in 2019 to wide critical acclaim. Libération has called Lynch “one of the great Irish writers of today”. He lives in Dublin with his wife and two children.

Photo credit: Joel Saget 

Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin writes books, screenplays and songs and works predominantly in the Irish language. His creative fiction-style biography of the 19th-century poet and songwriter, Antoine Ó Raiftearaí, Mise Raiftearaí an Fíodóir Focal (I am Raiftearaí, the Word-Weaver) was awarded the premier Irish-language Book of the Year Award, Gradam Uí Shúilleabháin, 2015. His season song book/CD Bliain na nAmhrán (The Year of Song) won a Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award, was included in the White Ravens Annual Catalogue of excellent children’s publications from around the world by the International Youth Library, Munich, Germany and won the Irish-language Book of the Year, Gradam Réics Carló, 2017. Screenwriting credits include the TV drama Aifric (Telegael, 2006-08 for TG4), which he co-created with director Paul Mercier and Telegael. The series won three consecutive Irish Film and Television Awards for best youth programme (2007, 2008 and 2009) and the Celtic Media Festival Bronze Torc Award for best young peoples’ production, 2009. The show has been broadcast in Europe, Latin America and Asia. His books for children have been translated to languages as diverse as Chinese, Breton, Korean, Danish and Faroese. His novel, Madame Lazare, was awarded the An Post Irish Book Award in 2021 for a work in Irish and was Ireland’s nominated book for the European Union Prize for Literature, 2022 where it was one of five novels to be awarded a Special Mention. Tadhg Mac Dhonnagáin lives and works in An Spidéal, in the Conamara Gaeltacht, or Irish-speaking region, on the west coast of Ireland.

 

(c) 'íomhá le caoinchead thogra Phortráidí na Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge' / 'image with permission from the Portráidí na Scríbhneoirí Gaeilge project'

Mac Lochlainn was born in Belfast in 1966. He writes in both Irish and English and his bi-lingual collections have received national and international awards. He has been writer in residence at Queens University, Belfast and the University of Ulster. He has been a fellow at the University of Massuchussetts, Boston. Mac Lochlainn also works as a broadcaster and presenter and has presented award winning documentaries on minority languages, poetry and music for BBC and TG4. Mac Lochlainn’s city is his muse- his poetry (and it’s unique approach to translation) explores issues of bi-lingualism and ‘fragmented’ identites in a modern Belfast that is emerging from the dark militarised era of ‘Troubles’, a city that is trying to find it’s place in an unstable European context.

His work looks at the social consequences of years of violence on his home city and asks questions about it’s past and future in the era of ‘Brexit’ uncertainties without a sitting devolved Assembly. Selections of Mac Lochlainn’s poems have been translated into several European languages. He has been an ambassador for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. He has worked and toured with many organisations including: Irish embassies, The British Council, and Literature Across Frontiers.

Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast but now lives in Glasgow. He has published six collections of short stories and five novels inluding Booker prize shortlisted Grace Notes (1997). He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio plays, television plays, screenplays and  libretti. He wrote and directed a short film ‘Bye-Child’ which won a BAFTA Scotland Award for Best First Director and a BAFTA nomination for Best Short Film. He is a member of Aosdána.

Photo credit: Jude MacLaverty

Deirdre Madden is one of Ireland’s leading authors. In understated, but resonant, prose she returns again and again to themes of memory, identity, the complexity of family relationships, the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and the integrity of the artistic life. Her work has won many prizes and has been widely translated into other languages.

Deirdre Madden was born in 1960 into a Northern Irish Catholic family in Toomebridge, County Antrim, the setting for some of her novels. Her father was a sand merchant, her mother a teacher. The outbreak of the Troubles in the North disrupted what was otherwise a happy childhood spent reading books. Despite the political tensions, a successful school career led her in 1979 to study English at Trinity College Dublin where she has said she felt immediately at home. While still a student, her first short stories were published in The Irish Press by David Marcus, the editor who launched the careers of so many Irish writers. This early success inspired Madden to pursue a Masters in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, the springboard for much fine contemporary writing. At UEA, she studied with Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter.

The clarity and understated lyricism of Deirdre Madden’s writing has attracted praise from fellow authors of the calibre of Richard Ford, Sebastian Barry, and Anne Enright. Writing in The Daily Telegraph Adam O’Riordan commented: ‘For almost thirty years, Irish writer Deirdre Madden has published novels of quiet and subtle brilliance’ (6 June 2013). The subtle quality of her writing requires an equally perceptive response from her readers. Such is her accuracy as a writer that to read one of Madden’s novels is less like reading fiction than to experience life unfolding. Her widely acknowledged skill as a novelist and her insightful observations on themes as universal as violence, integrity, family relationships and friendship ensure that her work will endure and continue to attract new readers.

 
‘Deirdre Madden’ by Heather Ingman at https://www.tcd.ie/trinitywriters. First published January 2016.

 

Photo credit: Mark Condren 

Christodoulos Makris is "one of Ireland's leading contemporary explorers of experimental poetics" (The RTÉ Poetry Programme). His latest book of poetry is Contemporaneous Brand Strategy Document, published by Veer Books in March 2023. Other recent publications include the books The Architecture of Chance (Wurm Press, 2015) - a poetry book of the year for RTÉ Arena and 3:AM Magazine - and this is no longer entertainment: A Documentary Poem (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019), the poetry postcard set Browsing History (zimZalla avant objects, 2018), and the interactive digital poetry project sorry that you were not moved (Fallow Media, 2022) in collaboration with Kimberly Campanello. It Reeks of Radio, the result of his commissioned creative engagement with the RTÉ Radio archives held at University College Dublin, is forthcoming later in 2023 with BLR Editions (UCD). His awards include a project commission from Irish Museum of Modern Art (2017), Writer in Residence at Maynooth University (2018-19), and a Literature Project Award from the Arts Council of Ireland (2020). He is the poetry editor at gorse journal.

Photo credit: Paula Álvarez

Emer Martin's first novel, Breakfast in Babylon, won the 1996 Book of the Year in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. The next year,  Houghton Mifflin released the book in the US. More Bread Or I’ll Appear, her second novel, was published internationally in 1999. Her third novel, Baby Zero, was published in the UK and Ireland in March 2007, and released in the US in 2014. The Cruelty Men is her latest novel, published in June 2018 and nominated for Irish Novel of the Year in 2019. 

Emer wrote several children's books: Why is the Moon Following Me? (2013); Pooka, a Halloween book for children (2016); and The Pig Who Danced (2017). 

Apart from working in literature Emer Martin studied painting in New York and has had two sell-out solo shows of her paintings at the Origin Gallery in Harcourt Street, Dublin.

In 2000 she was awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship.

 

photo by Jade Martin Partovi

SJ McArdle is an Irish songwriter and musician, known for his previous work in award-winning Irish folk band Kern and his career as a singer-songwriter in Nashville and Germany, which produced 2014’s critically-acclaimed Blood and Bones album. SJ is also one third of Long Woman’s Grave, featuring Nuala Kennedy and Trevor Hutchinson. SJ’s songs and performances have been featured in radio, film and television and he has toured and recorded extensively in Ireland, Europe and North America, gathering a loyal following and critical accolades along the way.

“A talented writer of both contemporary and traditional-style songs with immediate earworm qualities.” – Seamas Shiels, Fonn magazine

“SJ McArdle, who has had a successful solo career cultivating a rootsy folk-rock sound, can’t fail to capture your attention, with a sonorous voice – not unlike Garnet Rogers’s – that can be gritty and gruff yet also unexpectedly tender, even vulnerable. His writing exhibits a similar versatility.” – Sean Smith, Boston Irish

“Quite lovely … McArdle’s voice has a breathy gruffness to it that is commanding without being loud, and it sets a strong tone. ‘The Hard Wind’, a McArdle original, is a lively, cutting song about Irish soldiers who returned to Ireland after World War I to acrimony and indifference.” – Daniel Neely, The Irish Echo

“(In ‘The Hard Wind’) SJ McArdle has written a really fine and brave song … interesting, powerful and complex”– Mike Harding

“His smoky voice seems to have the very patina of life itself ingrained within his vocal cords and this gives his recordings real identity.” – TradConnect

“Bravo for an artist who has taken contemporary Irish music to parts it far too seldom reaches” – Hot Press

“SJ’s deep, sonorous voice brings authority to the songs. If Whipping Boy were raised in Nashville they might sound like this” – Mail On Sunday

“Spare couplets conjuring entire vistas with the focus of David Lynch” – The Irish Times

SJ McArdle’s new album, Old Ghosts In The Water, is produced by Trevor Hutchinson and presents a brand new song cycle, full of timeless, indelible folk songs - work songs, story songs, love songs to the sea. Songs written in anger and written in sorrow. Songs about injustice and change. Songs about people.

The songs were born of a year-long research and writing project around the history and stories of Drogheda’s ancient Port, conducted during SJ’s tenure as Artist in Association at Droichead Arts Centre in 2019 and are also presented as part of an accompanying Droichead-produced live show called PORT.

Old Ghosts in the Water was made with the deeply appreciated support of Droichead Arts Centre, Create Louth and the Arts Council Covid-19 Response Award.

RTÉ Radio 1 Album of the Week Old Ghosts In The Water got 4 stars from The Irish Times, who called it “an impressive song cycle ... the songs are intriguing and evocative; they are rooted in folk but coloured by expansive and imaginative arrangements.”

Fiachna Ó Braonáin (The Hothouse Flowers, RTÉ) said "What a great, great collection of songs this is from SJ McArdle. I urge you to go out and get it."

And Lynette Fay (BBC) said it had “all the ingredients of great folk songs”.

Along with critically-acclaimed Dublin vocalist Carol Keogh (Plague Monkeys, Automata, The Wicc) the band on the album includes double-bassist Trevor Hutchinson (Lúnasa, The Waterboys) and keyboard player and arranger Graham Henderson (Moving Hearts, Atlantic Arc Orchestra, Sinéad O’Connor) along with accordion legend Dermot Byrne (Altan, Declan O’Rourke) and Dundalk flute player Nuala Kennedy (The Alt).

 

Photo credit: Brian Connolly

John McAuliffe has published six books with The Gallery Press, most recently Selected Poems (2021 (UK); 2022 (US, with Wake Forest UP)), which was an Observer Book of the Year. The Kabul Olympics (2020) was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Month in June 2020 and a TLS and Irish Times 2020 Book of the Year. His versions of the Bosnian poet Igor Klikovac, Stockholm Syndrome (Smith Doorstop), was a Poetry Book Society Winter Pamphlet Choice in 2019, and his work as editor includes Carcanet's New Poetries VIII (2021) and Everything to Play For: 99 Poems About Sport (Poetry Ireland, 2015).

 

John grew up in Listowel, Co.Kerry, studied English and Law in Galway and joined the University of Manchester in 2004, where he is now Professor of Poetry. He served on the Irish Arts Council 2013-2018, where he was Deputy Director and chaired the Council's Strategy work. He wrote a regular poetry column for The Irish Times 2013-2020.

John is also Associate Publisher and Editor at the leading independent poetry press, Carcanet, and co-editor of the international journal PN Review, and is a trustee of Manchester's UNESCO City of Literature.

 

Photo credit: Ant Clausen 

Eimear McBride was born in 1976 in Liverpool to Northern Irish parents. Aged two she and her family returned to Ireland and her childhood was mostly spent in Tubbercurry, Co. Sligo. At fourteen they moved again to Castlebar, Co Mayo. In 1994, at seventeen, she went to London and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre. Much of her twenties were spent temping and travelling. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. It won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014. She moved to Cork in 2006, and Norwich in 2011, where she currently lives with her husband and daughter. The Lesser Bohemians was published in September 2016 and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2017. Her latest novel, Strange Hotel, was published in 2020. 

Photo credit: JMA Photograghy 

Niamh McCann is an Irish artist living and working in Dublin. Her interest is in the interweaving of fact and fiction, the overlapping layers of history and fable that are contained within the cultural and physical structures we construct. McCann works by drawing together different reference points and distilling them into a kind of sculptural poetry.

McCann presented the solo exhibition ‘Furtive Tears’ in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane in 2018/19. 2019 also saw the launch of the public work ‘IMMRAM Pavilion/Mother’s Lament’ on the grounds of the National Museum of Ireland – Country Life.

Other solo exhibitions include ‘La Perruque (Protest Song)’ at MAC Belfast and ‘Just Left of Copernicus’, Visual Carlow.

Group exhibitions include; ‘Future Perfect’, Rubicon-Projects Brussels, ‘Changing States’BOZAR, Belgium, ‘Time Out of Mind: Works from the IMMA Collection’, ‘Twenty’ at the Irish Museum of Modern Art; ‘In Other Words’, Lewis Glucksman Gallery, Cork; ‘this little bag of dreams’, Catherine Clark Gallery, San Francisco, and ‘Without-Boundarie’s, Wäinö Attonen, Museum of Art, Finland.

The artist is recipient of various Arts Council of Ireland awards, and fellowships at Cemeti Arthouse, Indonesia; HIAP, International Artists' Residency, Helsinki, Finland, URRA Artist Residency, Argentina and of Perspective and EV+A exhibition awards.

Her work is represented in the following collections: Irish Museum of Modern Art, the OPW, Limerick City Gallery, Swansea City Council, The London Institute, Hiscox Collection, London.

Photo credit: Aisling McCoy 

Molly McCloskey grew up in the US but spent 25 years living in Ireland, where parts of her 2017 novel When Light is Like Water (Penguin) are set. The novel was published in the US by Scribner as Straying. Molly is also the author of two short story collections, a novel, and a memoir, Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother. She has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times/EFG Short Story Award, the world’s largest prize for a single short story, and for the Irish Book Awards. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, the Los Angeles Review of Books, the Irish Times, and elsewhere. She has also worked in the field of international development in the UN’s Kenya-based Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia. She currently lives in Washington, DC.

Photo credit: Leone Brander

Barry McCrea is the author of a novel The First Verse, winner of the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction, and two works of non-fiction: In the Company of Strangers, a study of rival networks to the family in Dickens, Conan Doyle, Joyce, and Proust, and Languages of the Night, about the effect that dying languages and dialects had on the European literary imagination in the twentieth century. He is a professor of literature at the University of Notre Dame, where he has been teaching in its campuses in Rome and Indiana.

Photo credit: Francesco Giannone

Gavin McCrea's first novel, Mrs Engels (Scribe, 2015), was shortlisted for the Desmond Elliot Prize and the Walter Scott Prize, and longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award. His second novel, The Sisters Mao (Scribe, 2021), received high acclaim internationally. His first work of non-fiction, Cells (Scribe, 2022), was chosen as a book of the year by The Observer, The Irish Times and the Irish Independent, and was longlisted for the 2023 Polari Prize for LGBTQ+ literature. Most recently, he has been commissioned by Hachette/John Murray to write a novel of ideas featuring Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His articles have appeared in The Paris Review, The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Dublin Review, Lithub and Catapult

(c) photo by Derek Hudson

Rosaleen McDonagh is a Traveller woman with a disability. Originally from Sligo. She worked in Pavee Point Traveller & Roma Centre for ten years, managing the Violence Against Women programme, and remains a board member. Rosaleen has a BA in Biblical & Theological Studies, an MPhil in Ethnic & Racial Studies & an MPhil in Creative Writing, all from TCD. She holds a PhD from Northumbria University. She is a regular contributor to the Irish Times and has written ostensibly within the framework of a Traveller feminist perspective. McDonagh’s work includes Mainstream, The Baby Doll Project, Stuck, She’s Not Mine, and Rings. Rosaleen was appointed to The Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission in May 2020. She is also a member of Aosdana and is part of the BBC’s Writers Rooms Hothouse 2021 ( June/July).

Rosaleen was commissioned for a feature article in the Irish Times in 2012 responding to Channel 4’s series My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Her play Mainstream was directed by Olivier Award winner, Jim Culleton, for Fishamble and Project Arts Centre in 2016. In 2018, Fishamble produced Rosaleen’s play Running Out of Road in the RHK to mark the first anniversary of Traveller Ethnicity recognition. Rosaleen was writer in residence with Tuti Theatre Company in Adelaide, Australia in 2019. Corrib Theatre Company in Portland Oregon, USA, produced The Prettiest Proud Boy in May 2021. Walls & Windows was commissioned in May 2021 by The Abbey Theatre. Contentious Spaces commissioned by Project Arts Centre 2020/2021. Skein Press publishing collection of essays titled Unsettled in September 2021.

Terry McDonagh taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at the International School Hamburg. He has published ten poetry collections as well as letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. His work has been translated into German and Indonesian, and has been published worldwide in anthologies and literary journals. He has read at and facilitated workshops in Europe, Asia and Australia. He was Artistic Director of WestWords, the first Irish literature festival in Hamburg in May 2017. Further info can be found on his website: www.terry-mcdonagh.com.

Publications:

2018: Fourth Floor Flat – poetry – publisher Arlen House.

2017: Included in ‘Fire and Ice’ – Gill Education – poetry for Junior Cycle Secondary Schools.

2017: ‘UCG by Degrees’ – a poem unveiled at NUIGalway as part of Cuirt Festival and Galway Poetry Trail.

2016: Lady Cassie Peregrine – poetry – publisher, Arlen House.

2015: Mayo poet for Mayo Day, Sky TV.

2015: Translation by Terry McDonagh of Hemingway biography, Wie Alles Begann, into English – German author, Gino Leineweber.

2015: Echolocation – poetry for young people – Blaupause Books Hamburg.

2014: Michel the Merman: a tale based on North Sea legends.

2013: Ripple Effect – poetry – Arlen House, Galway.

2012: In the light of Bridges: Hamburg Fragments – prose/poetry

2011: The Truth in Mustard – poetry – Arlen House, Galway.

2009: Cill Aodáin & Nowhere Else – poetry – Mayo Co. Council.

2009: One Summer in Ireland – prose – Ernst Klett Verlag.

2008: Twelve Strange Songstwelve poems by Terry McDonagh, put to music for voice and string quartet by Eberhard Reichel.

2006: Boxes – poetry – Blaupause Books

2004 Something beginning with P– anthology of children’s poetry – O’Brien Press and Poetry Ireland.

2004: Tiada Tempat di Rawa – poetry translated into Indonesian by INDONESIA TERA, Magelang, Jogyakarta.

2001: Kiltimagh – poetry in translation by Mirko Bonne (English/German) Blaupause

1999: Elbe Letters go West (English/German) – a collection of letters – Blaupause.

1998: A World Without Stone – poetry – Blaupause Hamburg.

1992: The Road Out – poetry – Olaf Hille Verlag.

1991: Ich kann das alles erklären – drama – Karin Fischer Verlag.

Examples of readings/residencies:

In Australia, The Middle East, Indonesia, Thailand; in several European countries; Coole Park; Belfast Libraries; Wigtown Festival Scotland; Ballina Over the Edge; Clifden Arts Festival; NuiGalway; Cuisle Limerick; Eigenarten Festival Hamburg; Artistic Director of In Sight of Raftery Festival, Kiltimagh; Co Mayo. Dublin Book Festival; Irish Embassy Berlin; Clare Co. Libraries; Robert Burns Museum Ayrshire, Scotland; Cologne festival for young people with Children's Books Ireland and Poetry Ireland; workshops at the National Museum of Ireland, Collins Barracks, based on KPS system of education in Ireland between 1811 and 1831; writer in Residence in Melbourne, Australia at Caulfield Grammar, Irish Studies, University of Melbourne and RMIT; RTE Radio Drama (Junior) as narrator and voice; facilitated 'Samhain' creative writing programme with Museum of Country Life, Turlough and National Museum of Ireland, Dublin; Dublin Book Festival; 'Write to Read' programme with St Patrick's Teacher Training Dublin; Galway 2020 Culture Capital application, writing programme with Galway Co. Co and Baboro, Galway; Clifden Arts Festival residencies; Mayo Co. Libraries residencies; creative writing/drama workshops for European Council of International Schools in Nice, Paris, Hamburg, Berlin; Bonn, London, Dublin, West of Ireland, Brussels, Belfast, Stuttgart, Budapest and Kuwait city, Indonesia, Thailand; Dramatising Poetry – Workshops for Drama/literature teachers in Shakespeare Centre, Stratford upon Avon; Ubud/Bali International Writers Festival, and readings/lectures at Universitas Sanata Dhama, Yogyakarta, Indonesia; workshops with Piper Diarmaid Moynihan on poetry and piping in Galway, Coole Park, The Dock, Carrick on Shannon and Ballina Arts Centre; creative writing/drama programme in Dubai/Abu Dhabi with Beacon Schools; creative writing workshops with AGIS, Association of German International Schools; Education Centre Sligo; JCSP secondary teachers in Dublin; Brandenburg International School; Irish Embassy Berlin.

Some Impressions:

  • With his poetry, Terry McDonagh builds a language bridge between Hamburg and Ireland... Hamburger Abendblatt   
     
  • These poems are about the really important things in life that children see with such honesty. It is a world of daydreams and wonder, but also about misfits like ‘Tone Deaf Peter’ who are happy to sing their own song. McDonagh’s poetry will make you laugh, celebrate silliness and remember the freedom that comes with imagination. The poetry is like a sweet revenge on all those who love rules for their own sake…Geoffrey Gates, novelist, Sydney.
     
  • Terry McDonagh is no stranger to the world of literacy and education, having organised and presented creative writing and drama workshops, in-service for teachers and readings for children and adults all over Ireland in recent years. Helen Walsh, County Librarian, Co. Clare, Ireland.
     
  • A Song for Joanna is so successfully lodged in the particularities of Australia – its vibrancy, variety, expanse of sky and land, its mixed cultures and Aboriginal origins – that, returning from a trip to Ireland and filled with longing for it, I fell back in love with my own country. And through it all, the blue-green talisman of love...Robyn Rowland, Australian poet
     
  • A hilarious one about head lice. Yes, head lice!’ Terry McDonagh shows that even these can be a topic for a poemGordon Snell, Irish Times.
     
  • As a suite of poems, A Song for Joanna offers many pleasures; it is in part a series of cinematic skills, an aide-memoire, a dialogue between two worlds and a series of letters home, the vivid impressions of a painterly intelligence, whose keen powers of observation trace the author’s tenure as writer in and residence in Australia – Homer Rieth, Australian poet.
     
  • McDonagh’s poetry is characterized by richness of colour and precision – the trademark of the born poet. In his clear, simple style he invites us into a world in which we can learn more about ourselves...Hamburg International Poetry Festival Programme.
     
  • A stroke of luck to find a poet who is not only a good poet but also a good reader. Terry McDonagh’s poetry grows out of everyday situations but his thoughts and observations do not remain on the everyday surface...Kieler Nachrichten, Germany.
     
  • Here are poems of thresholds: the pub, church, graveyard, shopdoor, a bus stop in Hamburg. There is pathos, irony and social comment in a voice that is accessible and fond. “I can live anywhere, I think...   Meg McNeill, Tintean, Melbourne.
     
  • Terry McDonagh certainly keeps the bardic tradition of Ireland to the fore in all his poetry. Above all else, the humour in this intelligent collection, BOXES, rises like cream to the top…Colette Nic Aodha ...Inis, The Irish Literary Magazine.

 

 

Bernie McGill is the author of Sleepwalkers, a collection of stories short-listed in 2014 for the Edge Hill short story prize, and of the novels The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch HouseThis Train is For, her second short story collection, is set to be published in June 2022. She has been published in the UK, the US and in translation in Italy (La donna che collezionava farfalle; Le parole nell’aria) and in the Netherlands (Charlottes vleugels). Her short fiction has appeared in acclaimed anthologies The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore and Female Lines, and for the theatre she has written The Haunting of Helena Blunden and The Weather Watchers. She lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland with her family, works as a professional mentor with the Irish Writers’ Centre in Dublin and as a Writer in Schools for Poetry Ireland. She is currently Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast. 

www.berniemcgill.com

Photo credit: Jane McComb

Claire McGowan was born in Northern Ireland and moved to England to study at Oxford University. After living in France and China, she settled in London. She’s the author of the Paula Maguire crimes series, and several other novels under the name Eva Woods. She has also written plays, scripts, and short stories, and had a radio drama broadcast on Radio 4 in early 2019. She was awarded the Nickelodeon International Writing Fellowship in 2018, and as part of that spend time living in Los Angeles.

Photo credit: Jamie Drew

Medbh McGuckian was born in 1950 to Catholic parents in Belfast, Ireland. She studied with Seamus Heaney at Queen’s University, earning a BA and MA, and later returned as the university’s first female writer-in-residence.

McGuckian’s poems are layered collages of feminine and domestic imagery complicated by a liminal, active syntax that, in drawing attention to the weight of one phrase on another, emphasizes and questions our constructions of power and gender. Her work is reminiscent of Rainer Maria Rilke in its emotional scope and John Ashbery in its creation of rich interior landscapes. Praising McGuckian’s Selected Poems (1997), Seamus Heaney said, “Her language is like the inner lining of consciousness, the inner lining of English itself, and it moves amphibiously between the dreamlife and her actual domestic and historical experience as a woman in late-20th-century Ireland.”

McGuckian has earned significant critical acclaim over the course of her career. Her poem “The Flitting,” published under a male pseudonym, won the 1979 National Poetry Competition. In 1980 McGuckian published two chapbooks of poetry and also won the prestigious Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection, The Flower Master (1982), won the Poetry Society’s Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, and an award from the Ireland Arts Council. On Ballycastle Beach (1988) won the Cheltenham Award, and The Currach Requires No Harbours (2007) was short-listed for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. She has also won England’s National Poetry Competition and the Forward Prize for Best Poem.  Her first collection was published by Oxford University Press in 1982 and since 1991, The Gallery Press have published fifteen of her books.  The Unfixed HorizonNew Selected Poems was published by Wake Forest University Press in 2016 and a new selected poems is underway with The Gallery Press. Medbh taught Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queens and is a member of Aosdána.

Her honors also include the Bass Ireland Award for Literature, the Denis Devlin Award, and the American Ireland Fund’s Literary Award. She won the Forward Prize for Best Poem for “She Is in the Past, She Has This Grace.”

 

Photo credit: Paul Maddern

Lisa McInerney’s work has featured in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, Granta, The Guardian, Le Monde, The Irish Times, BBC Radio 4 and various anthologies and she's published in 11 languages. Her story 'Navigation' was longlisted for the 2017 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award. Her debut novel The Glorious Heresies won the 2016 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the 2016 Desmond Elliott Prize. Her second novel, The Blood Miracles, won the 2018 RSL Encore Award.

She also won the Premio Edoardo Kihlgren for European literature and has been nominated for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Premio Strega Europeo, the Sunday Times Short Story Award, and twice for the Dylan Thomas Award. Currently, McInerney is a contributing editor at The Stinging Fly and has just published her third novel, The rules of Revelation (2021). 

 

photo credit: Bríd O'Donovan

Scott McKendry is a poet-critic from Belfast. He’s currently a Lecturer of Practice at Queen’s University Belfast, where he’s writing a monograph on lesser-known northern poetry – both recently-published work and that of critically neglected twentieth-century figures – exploring aesthetic discourse, literary networking and factionalism, canon-building, and the politics of cultural exclusivity. McKendry’s chapter on language and memory in the Ulster ballad tradition was included in The Oxford Handbook of Irish Song, 1100–1850 (Oxford University Press, 2023). He is a recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and his pamphlet, Curfuffle (The Lifeboat), was Poetry Book Society Autumn Choice 2019. His first full collection, titled GUB, Corsair (Little, Brown) was published in February 2024.

(c) photo by Francisco Dapena

Maria McManus was born between the bridges of Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. A poet and playwright, Maria lives in Belfast. She is the author of Available Light (Arlen House, 2018), We are Bone (2013)The Cello Suites (2009) and Reading the Dog (2006) (Lagan Press).  Her writing for theatre includes work with Kabosh, TinderBox, Red Lead, Replay, Big Telly and Off the Rails, a dance company. 

Her passion is poetry in public space, and she has collaborated extensively with other artists to create Cirque des Oiseaux, DUST, and LabelLit. She has performed in Ireland, USA, the Basque Country, Portugal and Sweden.  She facilitates XBorders for the Irish Writers’ Centre and Under the Skin for the Seamus Heaney Home Place.  She has received numerous Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards, including ACES in 2015 and the Artists’ International Award 2016. She is artistic director and curator of Ireland’s only Poetry Jukebox.

Available Light is Maria’s third full collection of poetry. It is a contemporary intertextual exploration of the ancient art of augury – interpreting the will of the gods from the flight patterns of birds. The poems are unflinching and probe and explore questions of love, loss, migration, uncertainty, life and death, in its horror, brutality and beauty.

Photo credit: Leona O'Neill 

Alan McMonagle is a writer based in Galway, Ireland. In November 2015 he signed a two-book deal with Picador. His debut novel, Ithaca, was published in March 2017, and was nominated for the Desmond Elliott Award for first novels and an Irish Book Award. He has received awards for his work from the Professional Artists’ Retreat in Yaddo (New York), the Fundación Valparaiso (Spain), the Banff Centre for Creativity (Canada) and the Arts Council of Ireland. He has published two collections of short stories, Psychotic Episodes (Arlen House, 2013) and Liar Liar (Wordsonthestreet, 2008), both of which were nominated for the Frank O’Connor Short Story Award. His stories have appeared in many journals in Ireland and North America, and he has read from his work at many festivals at home and abroad. He also writes for radio and has had two radio plays (Oscar Night and People Walking On Water) produced and broadcast as part of Irish National Radio's (RTÉ) Drama on One season. His most recent novel, Laura Cassidy's Walk Of Fame was published in 2020.

Paul McVeigh began as a playwright with shows performed at the Edinburgh Festival and London’s West End. His short stories have appeared on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5, on Sky Arts TV and in Faber's Being Various: New Irish Short Stories, The Irish Times, The London Magazine and The Stinging Fly. His debut novel The Good Son won The Polari First Novel Prize and his work has been translated into seven languages. He is twice winner of The McCrea Literary Award. Paul has edited the Southword Journal, the Belfast Stories anthology, Queer Love, The 32: Anthology of Irish Working Class Writing. He is associate director of Word Factory "the UK’s national organisation for excellence in the short story", The Guardian, and he is co-founder and Director of the London Short Story Festival. Paul has judged many international literary competitions including The Dylan Thomas Prize, The Edge Hill Short Story Prize and The Sean O'Faolin Short Story Prize. 

Most recently, Paul’s play ‘Big Man’ was produced by the Lyric Theatre, as part of Belfast International Festival, and his ten part short story series aired on BBC Radio 4 2023.

He was acting Head of Literature for Arts Council of Northern Ireland 2021/22.

Photo credit: John Minihan

Lia Mills writes novels, short fiction, memoir and essays.  Her first novel, Another Alice, was nominated for the Irish Times Irish Fiction Prize. Nothing Simple was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year at the inaugural Irish Book Awards. Her memoir of an experience of oral cancer, In Your Face, was named as a favourite book of the year (2007) by several commentators. Her most recent novel, Fallen, was the Dublin/Belfast Two Cities One Book festival selection for 2016. That year she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Laws from the University of Dublin, Trinity College.

Lia has worked on several Public Art commissions. She has been an invited contributor to anthologies such as The Long Gaze Back (edited by Sinéad Gleeson) and Beyond the Centre: Writers on Writing  (edited by Declan Meade). Her work has appeared in, among others, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times and The Dublin Review of Books. Her first play, Katie, a monologue based on Fallen, was staged in 2016 as part of the Two Cities One Book Festival, for which she also devised and co-wrote a site-specific play with Bairbre Ní Chaoimh for the Irish Writers Centre (sic). She is an occasional blogger and a contributor to Arena (RTÉ Radio One).  Her work has been published in Holland, Brazil, Italy and India and she has been an invited reader in England, France, Spain and (part supported by Culture Ireland) in the USA, Canada, Italy and, most recently, Japan.

Photo credit: Simon Robinson 

Sarah Moore Fitzgerald is an award winning teacher and professor at UL with expertise in psychology, pedagogy and creative practice. Also a novelist, her first novel, Back to Blackbrick was published in 2013. A stage version was presented at the Edinburgh Festival and at the Arts Theatre in London’s West End. Her second novel, The Apple Tart of Hope, was shortlisted for the Waterstones Prize and the CBI Book of the Year Award and received a Kirkus star on USA publication in 2015. Sarah won the 2016 Irish Writers’ Centre’s Jack Harte Award. She has researched extensively on the writing process across a range of contexts, is part of the team that delivers the UL Frank McCourt Creative Writing Summer School at NYU and is founder of the UL Creative Writing Winter School. She has worked to develop a particular focus on fostering strategies for self-aware writing habits and on ways of making space and time to write. Her novel The List of Real Things came out in April 2018. And her most recent work – A Strange Kind of Brave - was published in 2021. While her last novel The shark and the scar is due to publication in June 2022. 

photo credit: Liam Burke

Sinéad Morrissey is the author of six poetry collections. Her awards include first prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, a Lannan Literary Fellowship and the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Both Through the Square Window and Parallax received the Irish Times Poetry Prize. She was the winner of the TS Eliot Prize in 2013 and of the Forward Prize in 2017. In 2020 she was awarded the European Poet of Freedom Award for her collection, On Balance, translated into Polish by Magdalena Heydel. She is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.  

Mary Morrissy was born in Dublin where she still lives. She has published two collections of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993) and Prosperity Drive (2016), and two novels inspired by true events: Mother of Pearl (1995), the story of a stolen infant, and The Pretender (2000), a fictional history of the Polish woman who claimed to be Anastasia, daughter of the last Romanov Tsar. Morrissy has taught in creative writing programmes at the Universities of Arkansas and Iowa in the US as well as in Trinity College, Dublin. A third novel, The Rising of Bella Casey, based on the life of Bella O'Casey, sister of the famous Irish playwright, was published in 2013. 

She has won the Hennessy Award and the Lannan Foundation Award and is a member of Aosdana since 2015. Currently she works as a literary critic, a writing coach and an editor with a 30 years' experience. Her forthcoming novel Penelope Unbound will be published by Banshee Press in September 2023. 

 

Photo credit: Colbert Kearney

'Songs of Joyce' is a musical extravaganza of songs drawn from the life and works of James Joyce, from bawdy street ballads and sea shanties to music hall hits and folksongs. Performed with gusto by Sinead Murphy and Darina Gallagher, this musical evocation of an era has been acclaimed by critics and academics alike, and to date has performed sell-out shows all over Ireland as well as Glasgow, Boston, New York and Moscow.

Following the success of their award winning show 'Songs of Joyce', Darina Gallagher and Sinead Murphy have created a new Joycean musical, 'Misses Liffey'. Through words and music, Anna Livia Plurabelle brings us on a riverrun journey through the city of Dublin introducing us to many of James Joyce’s female characters that live, work, sing and laugh along her banks. We hear from Nuvoletta and the Washerwomen from Finnegans Wake, the Morkan Sisters and Eveline from Dubliners and the Siren barmaids, Dilly Dedalus and the seaside girls in Ulysses. Anna finally bids us farewell as she meets her cold, mad father - the sea, only to fin again, begin again…

“A Joycean feast of music hall memories….delightful” Anne Madden, The Belfast Telegraph

“Comic joy – with a real sense of joie de vivre.” Alan Chadwick, Scottish Herald

Paul Murray is the author of four novels: An Evening of Long Goodbyes (shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award), Skippy Dies (longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for various other awards including the Costa Book Awards) and The Mark and the Void (winner of the Bollinger Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction). The Beesting, his latest novel, is published in June 2023. He also wrote the screenplay for Metal Heart (2018), which was directed by Hugh O’Conor. His stories and journalism has appeared in New York, Granta, The Paris Review, and The New York Times.

Photo credit: Chris Maddaloni 

Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the daughter of a writer and a professor who fought in the Irish War of Independence. She earned a BA and MA at University College Cork and also studied at Oxford University.

Ní Chuilleanáin uses transformative, sweeping metaphor to invert the structures of interior, natural, and spiritual realms. Awarding Ní Chuilleanáin the 2010 Griffin Prize, the judges noted, "She is a truly imaginative poet, whose imagination is authoritative and transformative. She leads us into altered or emptied landscapes. […] Each poem is a world complete, and often they move between worlds, as in the beautiful ‘A Bridge between Two Counties.’  These are potent poems, with dense, captivating sound and a certain magic that proves not only to be believable but necessary, in fact, to our understanding of the world around us."

Ní Chuilleanáin is the author of numerous poetry collections, including Acts and Monuments (1966), which won the Patrick Kavanagh Award; The Magdalene Sermon (1989), which was selected as one of the three best poetry volumes of the year by the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Poetry Book Prize Committee; Selected Poems (2009); and The Sun-fish (2010), which won the International Griffin Poetry Prize. Her most recent volume, The Boys of Bluehill (2015), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She translated two books by the Romanian poet Ileana Malancioiu,  After the Raising of Lazarus (2005) and The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012), as well as Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill’s The Water Horse (2001, co-translated with Medbh McGuckian). Ní Chuilleanáin’s work has been featured in several anthologies, including The Wake Forest Book of Irish Women's Poetry, 1967-2000 (1999, edited by Peggy O’Brien). She is Ireland Professor of Poetry 2016-19. Two new books have appeared in 2019: a translation of Antonella Anedda into Irish (Cois Life), and a new collection in English entitled The Mother House (Gallery Press).

Since 1975 she has edited the literary magazine Cyphers, and she has also edited Poetry Ireland Review. She has taught at Trinity College Dublin since 1966. With her husband, poet Macdara Woods (1942-2018), she divides her time between Ireland and Italy.

 

Photo credit: Patrick Redmond, courtesy of Wake Forest University Press

Annemarie Ní Churreáin is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her work often explores silence and power dynamics in the context of Irish landscape, history and the State. Her books include Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017), Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Poison Glen (The Gallery Press, 2021).

The Yale Review states that “Ní Churreáin captures a whole world of cultural and historical implications in a single, simple, but metaphorically rich image.” The Los Angeles Review of Books reports “That Ní Churreáin can condense the prototypical life of a young Irish woman into half a page while sustaining the poem’s impact is testament to her ability as a storyteller, the vividness of her language, and the universality of the portraits she is painting.”

Ní Churreáin has toured her work extensively in Ireland and abroad. Most recently she has been invited to perform at festivals in Europe, the U.S. and India. Her work has been translated into Italian, Galego and Malayalam. Her books are taught on several international university courses including the Writing Program at Florida Gulf Coast University and the Women's & Gender Studies Program at the University of South Carolina.

Ní Churreáin is also co-librettist of Elsewhere, a new opera by Straymaker (Ireland), Miroirs Étendus (France) and Opéra de Rouen Normandie, in partnership with Irish National Opera. The opera debuted in 2021 at The Abbey—National Theatre of Ireland.

A recipient of The Next Generation Artist Award (by President Michael D. Higgins on behalf of the Arts Council) and of The Markievicz Award, Ní Churreáin has received literary fellowships from Akademie Schloss Solitude Germany, Jack Kerouac House Florida and Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, France. In 2022 Ní Churreáin was the 2022 Decades of Centenaries Artist in Residence at Donegal Archives Service.

Ní Churreáin is a member of the Arts Council Writers in Prisons Panel. She lives and teaches in Dublin

 

Links

A link to the ARENA audio interview

https://www.rte.ie/radio/radio1/clips/22037127/

 

Dublin Review of Books

https://drb.ie/articles/the-stendhal-of-norfolk/

 

Website

www.studiotwentyfive.com

Photo credit: Enda Rowan 

Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill is widely acknowledged as one of the greatest poets in Ireland, also reputed for her dedication and defence of the Irish language. Ní Dhomhnaill has published extensively and her works include poetry collections, children’s plays, screenplays, anthologies, articles, reviews and essays. In her writings, Ní Dhomhnaill focuses on the rich traditions and heritage of Ireland, and draws upon themes of ancient Irish folklore and mythology that intermingle with contemporary issues concerning femininity, sexuality and culture. In 1981, Ní Dhomhnaill published her fist poetry collection, An Dealg Droighin (Cork: Mercier Press), and became a member of Aosdána. Other works include Féar Suaithinseach (Maynooth: An Sagart,1984); Feis (An Sagart, 1991), and Cead Aighnis (translated by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin and Medbh McGuckian; An Sagart, 1999). Ní Dhomhnaill’s poems appeared in English translation in the dual-language editions Rogha Dánta/Selected Poems(Dublin: Raven Arts Press, 1986, 1988, 1990; translated by Michael Harnett); The Astrakhan Cloak (Oldcastle: Gallery translated by Paul Muldoon, 1991, 1992), Pharaoh’s Daughter (Gallery, 1990), and The Fifty Minute Mermaid(translated by Paul Muldoon; Gallery, 2007).

In 2018, she received the Zbigniew Herbert International Literary Award for her achievements in poetry.

Éilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin. Author of more than thirty books, her work includes The Dancers Dancing, The Shelter of Neighbours, and Fox, Swallow, Scarecrow. Her most recent books are Twelve Thousand Days: A Memoir (shortlisted for the Michel Déon Award 2020), Little Red and Other Stories (Blackstaff 2020), and Look! It’s a Woman Writer. Irish Literary Feminisms 1970-2020 (ed.) (Arlen House, 2021) She has published seven collections of short stories and has been the recipient of many literary awards, most recently the Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature, and a Hennessy Hall of Fame Award. In Autumn 2020 she held the prestigious Burns Scholarship at Boston College. She is a member of Aosdána, and President of the Folklore of Ireland Society.

Photo credit: Lee Pellegrini 

 

Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh is a poet from Ireland who writes exclusively in the Irish language. A bilingual collection, The Coast Road, was published by the Gallery Press in 2016, and includes English translations by thirteen poets. Her own translations from he French of Andrée Chedid were published in 2019. Among the awards her work has garnered are the Michael Hartnett Award and the Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Prize, as well as bursaries from the Arts Council. She lectures in the Department of Modern Irish at University College Cork, and enjoys collaborating with musicians, dancers and artists. 

Ní Ghearbhuigh's most recent collection, Tonn Teaspaigh agus Dánta Eile, ['Heat Wave and Other Poems'] was written in the fog of early motherhood. It was awarded the prestigious Oireachtas prize for best poetry collection in 2019. Daniela Theinová has said of this work: "The poems in Tonn Teaspaigh highlight and challenge what seems to be an endless supply of dichotomies, including those between life and decay, beginning and closure, growth and stasis, attachmment and separation, resilience and anguish, ofthen showing them to be aspects of the same binary experience." 

www.ailbhenighearbhuigh.com

photo courtesy of Máire Uí Mhacáin

Doireann Ní Ghríofa writes both prose and poetry, in both Irish and English. She is the author of six critically-acclaimed books of poetry, exploring birth, death, desire, and domesticity. Her latest books are Lies (Dedalus Press, 2018), which draws on a decade of her Irish language poems in translation, Nine Silences (Salvage Press), a collaborative book with acclaimed visual artist Alice Maher, and To Star the Dark (Dedalus Press, 2021). Her essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, Paper Visual Art, and Gorse. Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (USA, 2018), a Seamus Heaney Fellowship (Queen's University, 2018), the Ostana Prize (Italy, 2018), and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature (Trinity College, 2016), among others. Doireann's artistic practice also embraces cross-disciplinary collaborations, fusing literature with film, dance, music, and visual art. She has been invited to perform her work internationally, most recently in Scotland, Paris, Italy, and New Zealand.

Further publications from Doireann include Clasp, Oighear, Dordéan, do Chroí - A Hummingbird, your Heart, and Dúlasair.

www.doireannnighriofa.com

Photo credit: Bríd O'Donovan

Darach Ó Scolaí is a writer and publisher. His novel An Cléireach (2007) won the Oireachtas Prize 2007 and Gradam Uí Shúilleabháin ‘Irish language Book of the Year’ 2008, and his edition of Táin Bó Cuailnge won the Aodán Mac Poilín Memorial Prize 2017 and Gradam Uí Shúilleabháin ‘Irish language Book of the Year 2018. His most recent novel Súil an Daill (2021) won the Oireachtas Prize 2019. 

Hi play Coinneáil Orainn (2006) won the Walter Macken Prize and a BBC Stewart Parker Award, and was adapted for the radio in 2009. As well as prose works and plays, he has written screenplays for the short films Cosa Nite (1998) and An Leabhar (2000), and for the television series Na Cloigne (2010).

Photo credit: Seán Ó Mainnín

Jean O’Brien has five published collections and two chapbooks, her latest, Fish on a Bicycle, New & Selected (Salmon 2016) was reprinted in 2018. 

O’Brien’s work broaches hard subjects without fear or compromise, she deals with illness, mental illness, women’s issues, nature and everything in between. With her directness of approach her poems are often strongly narrative and are always alert to the comic and everyday even when dealing with hard subjects.

She has won and been placed in many awards including the prestigious Arvon International Award (winner in 2010) The Fish International Award (Winner) The Forward Prize (Highly Commended) Voices of War (Shortlisted) and others. In 2017 she was awarded a Katherine and Patrick Kavanagh Fellowhip. Her poetry has received Arts Council support, she was awarded a Travel & Training Grant to Texas where she collaborated with the renowned artist Dixie Friend Gay. She has been awarded stays in Annaghmakerrigh artists retreat and in the Tin Jug retreat. She was also awarded an Aer Lingus Arts Flight and support for various Festivals she appeared in. She collaborated with the artist Ray Murphy for a series called Merman after her award-winning poem of the same name.

She has read in places such as Sin E and the Nuyorican in New York, The Irish embassy in Maylasia and London and in T.S. Rogers College in Texas as well as appearing in Diverse Dialogues along with artist Dixie Friend Gay also in Texas.

She has appeared in many festivals including the Cork International Festival, Laois Leaves Festival,  Kilkenny Arts Festival, An Cuirt, Dublin Book Festival, The Dromineer Festival amongst others. In conjunction with the Centre for Creative Practices (CFCP) and the Polish Embassy she took part in the tribute reading in the Lir Theatre in Dublin for deceased Nobel Laureate Wislaw Szmborska.

Her work is widely published and regularly broadcast on the National Radio Station RTE 1, Rattlebag, Arena and Words Lightly Spoken with Olivia O’Leary and various local radio. Her work was videoed for University College Dublin’s Special Collection for the Irish Poetry Reading Archive. Her work is regularly anthologised including most recently Reading the Future (Ed. Alan Hayes), Metamorphic: 21st century poets respond to Ovid Eds. Nessa O’Mahony and Paul Munden, Eavan Boland: Inside History (eds. Siobhan Campbell and Nessa O’Mahony), The Enchanting Verses (Irish ed. Patrick Cotter),  The Windharp, Poems of Ireland since 1916 (ed Niall MacMonagle), If You Ever Go, One City One Book (Eds. Pat Boran, Gerard Smyth), Even The Daybreak - 35 years of Salmon Poetry (Ed Jessie Lendennie).

She holds an M. Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College,in Dublin, and she tutors at postgraduate level for an American University, (both on-line and in person) where her work is also taught and is/was taught in University College Galway. She has tutored in the Irish Writers Centre, Ireland’s High Security Prison, Community Centres, Libraries and for Dublin City Council  and has worked with Irish Traveller Community.

 

You can check out her work at www.jeanobrien.ie

Billy O'Callaghan was born in Cork in 1974, and is the author of three novels: The Dead House, (Brandon/O'Brien Press, 2017), My Coney Island Baby (Jonathan Cape/Harper Collins, 2019), Life Sentences (Jonathan Cape, 2021) and four short story collections: In Exile (Mercier Press, 2008), In Too Deep (Mercier Press, 2009) The Things We Lose, The Things We Leave Behind (New Island Books, 2013) and The Boatman and Other Stories (Harper Collins, 2020)

Winner of the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year in 2013, and the recipient of literature bursaries from both the Arts Council and the Cork County Council, his story, 'The Boatman', was a finalist for the 2016 Costa Short Story Award while My Coney Island Baby was shortlisted for the Encore Award 2020 presented by Royal Society of Literature. 

More than one hundred of his short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines around the world, most recently in Agni, the Chattahoochee Review, Kenyon Review, London Magazine, Ploughshares, Salamander and the Saturday Evening Post.

https://billyocallaghan.ie/en/

Photo credit: Hedwig Schwall

Philip O'Ceallaigh has published over 50 short stories and three collections, most recently Trouble (2021, Stinging Fly Press). John Banville has declared him as a “master” who has dared stay loyal to the shorts story form, Colm Toibin described him as “a brilliant, uncompromising and ambitious writer” and Rob Doyle named him his favourite living writer of short stories”. His work has been translated into over a dozen languages, has appeared in Granta, The Irish Times and The Los Angeles Review of Books and been broadcast on BBC radio. He is a recipient of the Rooney prize for Irish literature, among other honours.

He is also is a critic and essayist, and his translation from Romanian of Mihail Sebastian’s interwar novel For Two Thousand Years (Penguin Modern Classics) stirred international interest in that writer. He lives in Bucharest, Romania.

Nuala O’Connor lives in Co. Galway, Ireland. Her short story ‘Gooseen’ won the UK’s 2018 Short Fiction Prize, was published in Granta and was shortlisted for Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Nuala’s third novel, Miss Emily, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid was shortlisted for the Eason Book Club Novel of the Year 2015 and longlisted for the 2017 International DUBLIN Literary Award. Her fourth novel, Becoming Belle, was published to critical acclaim in September 2018. Her fifth novel, Nora, about Nora Barnacle and James Joyce, was published in January 2021.

www.nualaoconnor.com

Photo credit: Emilia Krystofiak

Poet and novelist Mary O’Donnell was born in County Monaghan and studied German and philosophy at National University of Ireland, Maynooth. O’Donnell is recognized as a leading figure in the generation of Irish women writers who began publishing in the 1980s and 1990s; her work is often cited as key in expanding the horizons of Ireland’s traditionally male-dominated literary world. O’Donnell has published numerous collections of poetry, including Reading the Sunflowers in September (1990) and Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody (1993), both nominated for an Irish Times Literature Award. Her other books of poetry include September Elegies (2003), The Place of Miracles (2006), and The Ark Builders (2009). A Hungarian translation of her new and selected poems was published in 2011. With Manuela Palacios, she coedited To the Winds Our Sails: Irish Poets Translate Galician Poetry (2010).
 
O’Donnell’s works of fiction include the novels The Light-Makers (1992), The Elysium Testament (1999), and Where They Lie (2014). She has also published works of short fiction, including Strong Pagans (1991) and Storm over Belfast (2008). Her essays and criticism have been widely published, and she has presented programs on poetry for RTÉ. O’Donnell has received numerous awards for her work, including a Hennessy Literature Award, an Allingham Award, and prizes from the Fish International Short Story Competition and the Cardiff International Poetry Competition.
 
Formerly on faculty in Carlow University Pittsburgh’s MFA program, O’Donnell has also taught in the Iowa Summer Writing Program at Trinity College and NUI Maynooth. She currently teaches poetry at Galway University. In 2001 she was elected to Aosdána, the Irish artists’ organisation.

 

Reading the Sunflowers in September, poetry collection, Salmon Poetry (1990)

Strong Pagans and other Stories, short story collection, Poolbeg Press (1991)

The Light Makers, novel, Poolbeg Press (1992 & 1993), 451Editions (revised edition) (2017)

Spiderwoman’s Third Avenue Rhapsody, poetry collection, Salmon Poetry (1993)

Virgin and the Boy, novel, Poolbeg Press (1996)

Unlegendary Heroes, poetry collection, Salmon Poetry (1998)

The Elysium Testament, novel, Trident Press UK (1999)

September Elegies, poetry, Lapwing Press, Belfast (2003)

The Place of Miracles, New and Selected Poems, New Island, Dublin (2005)

Storm over Belfast, short story collection, New Island, Dublin (2008)

The Ark Builders, poetry, Arc Publications UK (2009)

To the Winds Our Sails, Galician women’s poetry in translation, co-edited with Manuela Palacios, Salmon (2010)

Csodák földje, Selected Poems, translated to Hungarian by Kabdebó Tamás, Irodalmi Jelen Könyvek (2011)

Sister Caravaggio, collaborative novel with Peter Cunningham and others, Liberties Press, 2015.

Where They Lie, novel, New Island, Dublin (2014)

Those April Fevers, Arc Publications UK (2015)

Empire, short story collection, Arlen House (2018)

 

Giving Shape to the Moment: the Art of Mary O’Donnell, Poet, Short story writer, Novelist, published in the Reimagining Ireland series by Peter Lang publishers. Editor, Dr. Maria Elena Jaime de Pablos. 2018.

Photo credit: Jim Sweeney

Nessa O'Mahony was born in Dublin, Ireland. She has published five books of poetry -- Bar Talk, appeared (1999), Trapping a Ghost (2005), In Sight of Home (2009), Her Father’s Daughter (2014) and The Hollow Woman on the island (2019). Arlen House published her debut work of crime fiction, The Branchman, in 2018. She completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Bangor University in 2006. She is a recipient of three literature bursaries from the Arts Council and was Writer Fellow at the John Hume Institute for Global Irish Studies in UCD in 2008/09. Novelist Joseph O’Connor described her verse novel In Sight of Home as ‘a moving, powerful and richly pleasurable read, audaciously imagined and achieved’ whilst poet Tess Gallagher said of Her Father’s Daughter that ‘words are her witching sticks and she employs them with beautiful, engaging intent, the better to make present what has preceded and what approaches.’  She edited a special issue on Irish poetry for the Dutch journal, De Brakke Hond.  In 2016, she co-edited with poet Siobhan Campbell a book of critical essays on the work of Eavan Boland – Eavan Boland: Inside History is published by Arlen House. In 2017, she co-edited with poet Paul Munden Metamorphic: 21st Century Poets Respond to Ovid. She produces and presents a monthly podcast for writers called 'The Attic Sessions'.

Photo credit: Jack Zibluk
(c) ​​​​​​Nessaomahony - CC BY-SA 4.0, via wikicommons

Fran O'Rourke is an Irish singer who specialises in the songs of James Joyce. A philosopher by trade and Professor Emeritus of the School of Philosophy, University College Dublin, he also has a vibrant interest in Joyce and has performed the writer's songs on many occasions, solo and together with guitarist John Feeley. They have also recorded the album JoyceSong - Irish Songs of James Joyce together. Most recently, in September 2017, Fran gave a recital for the Irish embassy in Moscow.

Fran recently completed a second PhD at University College Dublin on James Joyce, Aristotle and Aquinas. As well as performing the Irish songs which feature in Joyce's writings, he has recently lectured on philosophical elements in Joyce in Houston, Berkeley, Rome, Shanghai and Novosibirsk. He is happy to give both a talk on Joyce and philosophy, as well as a recital of Joyce-related Irish songs.

Fran retired in 2016 as professor of Philosophy from University College Dublin, where he taught for thirty-six years. A graduate of University College Galway, he studied at the universities of Vienna, Köln, Louvain, and Leuven, where he received his PhD summa cum laude in 1986. He has held Fulbright and Onassis fellowships, and in 2003 was Visiting Research Professor at Marquette University.

His book Pseudo-Dionysius and the Metaphysics of Aquinas (2005) was described by Alasdair MacIntyre as ‘one of the two or three most important books on Aquinas published in the last fifty years’. His study of James Joyce and Aristotle, Allwisest Stagyrite: Joyce’s Quotations from Aristotle, was published by the National Library of Ireland in 2005. His latest publications, Aristotelian Interpretations (2016, by the Irish Academic Press) also contains an extensive chapter on Joyce.

 

Photo: Fran with Joyce's guitar, repair of which he sponsored.

Photo credit: Mihai Cucu

Glenn Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961 and studied on the Creative Writing MA at the University of East Anglia taught by Malcolm Bradbury. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1988 and was Writer in the Community for Lisburn and Craigavon under a scheme administered by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.

He is the author of several novels. The first, Burning Your Own (1988), set in Northern Ireland in 1969, won a Betty Trask Award and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Fat Lad (1992), was shortlisted for the Guinness Peat Aviation Book Award and explores the effects of the political situation in Northern Ireland through the story of a young man returning to his homeland after an absence of ten years. Black Night at Big Thunder Mountain (1995) narrates the experiences of three people brought together on the Euro Disney construction site. The International (1999), is set in a Belfast hotel in 1967, and tells the story of a day in the life of Danny, an 18-year-old barman. Number 5 (2003), traces the lives of the various occupants of a Belfast house over a 45-year period. That Which Was (2004), is also set in Belfast and explores the interaction between memory, history and society. Lapsed Protestant, a collection of his non-fiction, was published in 2006.  His more recent work includes The Third Party (2007), The Mill For Grinding Old People Young (2012), Gull (2016) and Where are we now? (2020). Glenn is currently a Professor of Creative Writing in the School of Arts, English and Literature at Queen's University Belfast.

Photo credit: John Harrison

Former ghost-writer, Nicola Pierce has written four novels of historical fiction for children and is currently working on her fifth. Her first novel, Spirit of the Titanic, published by The O'Brien Press in 2011, was reprinted five times within its first twelve months. Her second novel, City of Fate, about World War II's Battle of Stalingrad, was shortlisted for the Warwickshire Year Nine Book Award 2014. In 2015, The O'Brien Press published Behind the Walls, about the 1688-9 Siege of Derry. Kings of the Boyne, released in 2016, was shortlisted for the 2017 LAI Children’s Book Award.  Her most recent book, published in April 2018, was a history book for adults, Titanic, True Stories of Her Passengers, Crew and Legacy

Emilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review (https://www.euppublishing.com/loi/iur) and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the fields of Irish studies, Performance studies, and memory studies, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press, 2019).

Her first collection of personal essays, Notes to Self, is published by Tramp Press (2018) in Ireland & Hamish Hamilton in the UK, was shortlisted for the Royal Irish Academy Michel Deon award, and has won the IACI Butler Literary Award, and the An Post Irish Book Awards for Best Newcomer, and Book of the Year 2018.

Photo credit: Ruth Connolly

 

Leeanne Quinn was born in 1978 in Drogheda, Co. Louth. Her debut collection of poetry, Before You, was published by Dedalus Press in 2012. The collection was highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013.

Before You is a book about loss and memory. The poems explore the intimacies of a sibling relationship, revisiting childhood memories following the death of the poet’s older sister. The collection also includes a long sequence of poems that engage with the work of Elizabeth Bishop. Poet Paul Perry says of the collection: “There’s a graceful and assured rigor to the lyrics in Leeanne Quinn’s Before You. … She is a poet of intimacy and quiet recollection, a poet who writes about loss with heartbreaking compassion. … Before You is a book of sparing and hard-earned poems; it is a wonderful achievement.” Reviewing Before You for The Stinging Fly, Lucy Collins wrote: “These are intimate and finely-tuned lyrics, observant of subjective states and patterns of shared experience… It marks a debut of considerable depth and maturity.” Tracy Youngblom, writing for the New Hibernia Review, called Before You a collection that “hums with an inner life."

Her second collection, Some Lives, was published by Dedalus Press in October 2020. Some Lives is a book about repeating cycles of violence in the 20th and 21st century, focusing in particular on the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam and his wife Nadezhda, their friends and fellow-poets Marina Tsvetaeva, and Anna Akhmatova.

Her poems have been broadcast on RTÉ One radio and published in a variety of magazines and journals, including The Stinging Fly, The Moth, Poetry Ireland Review, Cyphers, and The Irish Times. Her work has also been widely anthologized and included in collections such as Niall MacMonagle’s Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916 (Penguin: 2015), the UNESCO Dublin: One City One Book title for 2014, If Ever You Go: A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song (Dedalus: 2014), and The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 (Faber: 2012). In 2013 she was comissioned by Dublin City Council to write a poem about the Cathach of Colm Cille as part of the Colm Cille Spiral project organised by Derry City of Culture 2013.

Leeanne has twice been the recipient of an Arts Council of Ireland Bursary Award for Literature (2018 & 2012). In August 2018 she spent two weeks as Writer in Residence at the Heinrich Böll cottage on Achill Island. She holds a PhD in American Literature from Trinity College Dublin, an MA from UCC, and a BA from UCD. Having lived in Dublin for most of her adult life, she recently relocated to Munich, Germany.

Author photo © Monika Chmielarz.

Heather Richardson was born in Northern Ireland in 1964. She studied English Literature at the University of Leicester, and over the next few years worked in a variety of non-literary jobs, including stints as a bus driver, pharmaceutical sales representative and company director. She later studied part-time to gain an MA (Lancaster University) and PhD (Open University) in Creative Writing. Her fiction, poetry and creative non-fiction has been published in magazines in the UK, Ireland, Europe and Australia, including Stinging Fly, Meniscus, Incubator and the European Journal of Life Writing. In 2000 she was winner of the Brian Moore Short Story Award. She has published two novels, Magdeburg (Lagan Press, 2010), and Doubting Thomas (Vagabond Voices, 2017). In 2006 she began teaching at the Open University, and is now part of the academic team running the OU’s online MA in Creative Writing. Her current interest is narrative textiles, exploring life writing and story telling through fabric and stitch.

Photo credit: Elaine Hill

Billy Roche's first novel, Tumbling Down, was published by Wolfhound Press in 1986, followed by The Wexford Trilogy for The Bush Theatre. The Wexford Trilogy (A Handful Of Stars- Poor Beast In The Rain- Belfry) was later filmed for the B.B.C. His other plays include Amphibians (R.S.C) The Cavalcaders (The Abbey / Royal Court), On Such As We and Lay Me Down Softly (Abbey Theatre). Most recent plays include A Love Like That (Decadent Theatre) Of Mornington (Scalder Theatre) and The Diary Of Maynard Perdu (Menapia Theatre.)

Tales From Rainwater Pond, his acclaimed collection of short stories, was published by Pillar Press. He wrote the screenplay Trojan Eddie (winner of the San Sabastian Film Festival) and co-wrote the IFTA award winning The Eclipse with Conor McPherson (inspired by Billy’s short story "Table Manners"). The RTE four-part series Clean Break followed along with a short monologue for the stage called The Dog and Bone ( Wexford Arts Centre/ Lincoln Centre, New York).

Billy has been Writer-In-Residence at the Bush and Writer –In-Association at Druid and the Abbey Theatre

Billy Roche is a member of Aosdana.

Photo credit: Shane Fox

Stephen Sexton’s first book, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. Cheryl’s Destinies was published in 2021, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast.

Photo credit: Michael Weir

Gerry Smyth has been a lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University since 1991. He researches in the areas of Irish cultural history (particularly popular music), modern fiction, post-colonialism, and contemporary critical theory. He has lectured across Europe and the United States, and held fellowships at institutions in Prague, Monaco and Vienna. In 2012 he received Honorary Membership of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. He is a member of the International Association for the Study of Irish Literature, the British Association for Irish Studies, and the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies. 

Smyth is a founder member of the Liverpool-Irish Literary Theatre, specialising in the writing and production of plays on Irish literary themes. In 2011 Smyth wrote a two-man show entitled The Brother which he adapted from the work of Flann O'Brien. He performed the play (with actor David Llewellyn, directed by Andrew Sherlock) at an international Flann O'Brien conference in Vienna in July 2011, and at another international conference in Trieste in May 2012. The Brother had a six-night run at the Edinburgh Free Fringe Festival in August 2012, and has subsequently been performed at the Eleanor Rathbone Theatre (the University of Liverpool), as part of the 2012 May Festival at the University of Aberdeen, and at the IASIL (International Association for the Study of Irish Literature) Conference in Lille in June 2014. Smyth wrote a companion piece entitled Will the Real Flann O'Brien ...? A Life in Five Scenes which he performed (in a double header with The Brother) at the 2013 Liverpool Irish Festival, and at the Third Flann O'Brien Conference in Prague in July 2015. The Liverpool Irish Literary Theatre travelled to the O'Brien conference Salzburg in July 2017 to perform a trio of short plays, including two by Flann O'Brien - Thirst and The Dead Spit of Kelly - as well as The Golden Gate by Lord Dunsany.

In August 2017 Smyth's play Nora & Jim - based on an episode in the lives of James Joyce and Nora Barnacle - ran for six nights at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.

In October 2018 Smyth’s cabaret adaptation of the album ‘’Murder Ballads’’ by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds premiered at the Liverpool Royal Court. The show played to excellent reviews over three nights, and was developed for further performances throughout 2019.

Gerry Smyth is also a musician. Besides a variety of folk music, Smyth has recorded two albums of specifically Irish interest: James Joyce's Chamber Music: New Folkish Settings of the Thirty-Six Lyrics (2012) and Words for Music, Perhaps: Fifteen Songs Set to the Poetry of W.B. Yeats (2019).

With the Liverpool-Irish Literary Theatre (LILT) Smyth has written, produced and performed a number of Irish-related shows, including The Brother (2011), Will the Real Flann O'Brien...? (2013), Nora and Jim (2016), A Drink with Brendan Behan (2018), and Echoes of a Blue Dee: A New Setting of the Deirdre Legend (2019). 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CY23GIVxrqE

Deirdre Sullivan is an award-winning writer and teacher from Galway. She has written eight books for young adults, including Savage Her Reply (Little Island 2020), and a collection of short fiction, I Want To Know That I Will Be Okay (Banshee Press 2021).

(c) photo courtesy of Diarmuid O Brien

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M. Forster Award in 1995 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters and is a member of Aosdána, an Irish organisation founded to promote the arts.

His novels include The South (1990), The Heather Blazing (1992), The Story of the Night (1996), The Blackwater Lightship (1999) and The Master (2004). He also writes non-fiction: The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe(1994) and The Irish Famine (1999) (with Diarmaid Ferriter). His latest books are Brooklyn (2009), winner of the 2009 Costa Novel Award; a collection of short stories, The Empty Family (2010); New Ways to Kill Your Mother (2012), a book of essays, and The Testament of Mary (2012), shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. More recent work includes The Testament Of Mary (2012), Nora Webster (2014) and House of Names (2017).  

He was appointed Chancellor of the University of Liverpool in 2017 while in 2021 he won the David Cohen Prize for Literature. His last novel, The Magician, won the Rathbones Folio Prize in 2022. 

David Toms is an Irish writer based in Norway. His poetry is widely published in Ireland in journals including BansheeThe Stinging Fly, and Channel and internationally in the UK and US. His work has been anthologised in Ireland and the UK, most recently in All Strangers Here (Arlen House/Syracuse University Press, 2021). He is previously a recipient of Arts Council of Ireland Literary Bursary and Agility Awards. His most recent books are a poetry collection Northly (Turas Press, 2019) and a memoir Pacemaker (Banshee Press, 2022).

 

Photo courtesy of Derek Foott. 

Jessica Traynor’s work engages with history and its echoes, especially in connection to the landscape, politics and geography of her native Dublin. Traynor's latest publication, Pit Lullabies (2022) is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, while her second collection, The Quick, was a 2019 Irish Time poetry choice. Poet Helen Mort has said of the work: “Visionary, luminous and haunted, Jessica Traynor’s poems are home to a host of compelling characters: witches, changelings, the spirit of Hildegard of Bingen. In The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2018), even the grotesque is rendered with subtle delicacy – a woman whose ‘lungs fold like an origami bird’. These poems will give you goose-bumps.”

Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), her debut, was shortlisted for the 2015 Strong/Shine Award. In 2016, it was named one of the best poetry debuts of the past five years on Bustle.com. Cordite Review said of the collection: “The quality of its work guarantees that Traynor is a poet to keep reading and listening to. Her language is fresh, erudite and engaging.”

Jessica is under commission by Poetry Ireland and Chamber Choir Ireland to work with composer Elaine Agnew to create a thirty-minute choral piece for performance in the National Concert Hall in 2019. In 2016, she was commissioned by the Salvage Press to write a suite of poems in response to Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal. She was invited by actor Stephen Rea to recite these poems at the Field Day ‘Right to Have Rights’ lecture series in autumn 2017. In 2016, she was commissioned by the Irish Writers Centre and the Arts Council to write 'A Demonstration’ for the Easter Rising commemorations.

Her poems feature regularly in international poetry journals and have been anthologised in A Bittern Cry (Poetry Ireland), Hallelujah for Fifty Foot Women (Bloodaxe), The Deep Heart’s Core, If Ever You Go (Dedalus Press) and Windharp (Penguin). Poems are regularly broadcast on Irish national radio. In 2016, she was selected as one of the Rising Generation of poets by Poetry Ireland.

Awards include the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary 2014, Hennessy New Irish Writer of the Year 2013 and the 2011 Listowel Poetry Prize. She was the 2010 recipient of a Dublin City Council Literature Bursary. College. She is an inaugural Creative Fellow of UCD, where she completed her MA in Creative Writing in 2008, and is Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Writer in Residence for 2021-22. Her poetry has been translated into Czech, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Polish, Portuguese and Spanish and was projected in Edinburgh, Krakow, Prague and Dunedin in 2014-16 as part of the Unesco City of Literature Programme.

https://jessicatraynor.com/

Photo credit: Róisín Jones

Melatu Uche Okorie is a Nigerian-born writer, educator, and scholar, based in Ireland. She was born in the mid-1970s in Nigeria and grew up in the eastern part of the country before moving to Ireland in 2006.

Melatu has a Mphil in Creative writing from Trinity College Dublin. She is best known for her critically acclaimed collection of short stories, This Hostel Life published in 2018. The book is a collection of three interconnected stories that explore the experiences of African migrants in Ireland.

In addition to her writing, Okorie is also a dedicated educator and has taught writing and literature at various universities and institutions in Ireland. She is a strong advocate for diversity in literature and has worked to create opportunities for marginalized voices to be heard.

Okorie’s writing has been widely praised for its honesty, depth, and compassion. She has been described as a brave and important voice in Irish literature and has received the Metro Éireann Writing Award for her story ‘Gathering Thoughts’.

Overall, Melatu Uche Okorie is a talented and accomplished writer. Her work serves as a powerful reminder of the importance of diverse voices in literature.

Photo credit: Leo Byrne Photography

William Wall is a novelist, poet and short story writer. He is the author of six novels, four collections of poetry and three of short fiction. His work concerns itself with political and social themes – class in Ireland, the family, corruption, the urban/rural divide – as well as personal themes of love, loss and suffering. He is, perhaps, best known for his  striking prose, his writing of complex female characters and his long commitment to representing the complexity, internal tensions and destructive forces inherent in the nuclear family in Ireland. In this context his novels, in particular, can be read as a single oeuvre.

Born in Cork, Ireland, he now divides his time between Cork and Liguria, Italy. He is the first European winner of the Drue Heinz Literature Prize (2017) and has toured the US East Coast with the resulting collection of short fiction called The Islands. He holds a PhD in Creative Writing from the School of English, University College Cork, the first such doctorate awarded in Ireland. 

‘Wall writes prose so charged – at once lyrical and syncopated – that it’s as if Cavafy had decided to write about a violent Irish household’. — The New Yorker

‘Wall’s touch with characterisation is light and deft: many illustrate themselves plainly with just a few lines of dialogue.’ — The Guardian

‘Wall engages not just with current Irish economic and political crises but Ghost Estate is also a book that explores the larger, darker contexts of our contemporary historical climate.’ — Southword

His 2005 novel This is The Country was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards and the Mind Prize.

His short fiction and poetry have won The Drue Heinz Literature Prize, the Virginia Faulkner Award, The Sean O’Faoláin Prize, several Writer’s Week prizes, The Patrick Kavanagh Award and been shortlisted for numerous others including The Raymond Carver Award, The Manchester Fiction Prize and The Hennessy Prize. He has received Irish Arts Council Bursaries, travel grants from Culture Ireland and translations of his books have been funded by Ireland Literature Exchange. He has received public commissions.

He is not a member of Aosdána for political reasons explained in his essay ‘Riding Against The Lizard’ (see http://williamwall.net/free-books-and-essays.html). His work has been translated into many languages, including Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Latvian, Serbian and Catalan. He has a particular interest in Italy and translates from Italian.

In 2014 he was part of the Italo-Irish Literature Exchange  which gave readings at various places in Italy and which led to a joint Italian/Irish set of publications. He was an Irish delegate to the European Writers’ Parliament in Istanbul 2010. He was a 2009 Fellow of The Liguria Centre for the Arts & Humanities. He collaborated with artist Harry Moore to produce the Shadowlands exhibition and book in 2008.

 

Publications

Novels

Suzy Suzy (New Island, Dublin and Head of Zeus, London, 2019)

Grace’s Day (New Island, Dublin and Head of Zeus, London, August 2018)

This Is The Country (Hodder/Sceptre, London, 2005)

The Map of Tenderness (Hodder/Sceptre, London, 2002)

Minding Children (Hodder/Sceptre, London, 2001)

Alice Falling (Hodder/Sceptre, London/WW Norton, New York, 2000)

 

Poetry Collections

Smugglers In The Underground Hug Trade (Doire Press, Galway, 2021) 

The Yellow House (Salmon Poetry, Clare, 2017)

Ghost Estate (Salmon Poetry, Clare, 2011)

Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me (Dedalus, Dublin, 2004)

Mathematics & Other Poems (The Collins Press, Cork, 1997)

 

Short Stories

The Islands (Pittsburgh University Press, USA, 2017)

Hearing Voices/Seeing Things (Doire Press, Galway, 2016) [Collection]

No Paradiso (Brandon Book, Dingle, Kerry, 2006) [Collection]

 

Essays, Reviews, Translations

Most essays and reviews are available to read online at The Ice Moon (http://williamwall.net/The-Ice-Moon/index.html

Translation blog:

http://williamwall.net/blog/index.html

Email contact: williamwall@gmx.com

Website: www.williamwall.net

Photo credit: Liz Kirwan 

Adam Wyeth lives in Dublin and is an award-winning poet, playwright and essayist with five books published. 

 

Wyeth's poetry has won and been commneded in many international competitions, including The Bridport Poetry Prize, The Arvon Poetry Prize and The Ballymaloe Poetry Prize. His work appears in several anthologies including The Forward Prize Anthology (2012 Faber), The Best of Irish Poetry (Southword 2010) and The Arvon 25th Anniversary Anthology. In 2016, Wyeth was selected for the Poetry Ireland Review's Rising Generation of Irish Poets. Composer Michael Doherty (BBC, Channel 4) adapted three of Wyeth's poems for a choral piece, called The Art of Dying, which got 2nd prize in the West Cork Chamber Festival 2017. 

 

Wyeth's critically acclaimed debut collection, Silent Music (2011) was Highly Commended by the Forward Poetry Prize. Reviewing his collection for The Stinging Fly, Ailbhe Darcy wrote: 'Adam Wyeth is a poet of ideas exquisitely wrought and swarming, demanding a reader awake to complexity on a subtle scale. Silent Music is a debut of astonishing assurance'. 

 

Since the publication of his second book, The Hidden World of Poetry: Unravelling Celtic Mythology in Contemporary Irish Poetry (2013), which contains poems from Ireland's leading poets followed by sharp essays that unpack each poem and explore its Celtic mythological references, much of Adam's work has been concerned with Celtic mythology and Jungian psychology. He has held various accessible talks and papers around this interest, his most recent Depth Literature: Irish Myth and Modernism was published in 2021. 

 

His third book and second poetry collection The Art of Dying was published with Salmon in November 2016 and was named as an Irish Times Book of the Year. 

 

Wyeth's playwriting has seen him move to an increasingly more modernist and experimental approach. His plays have had several professional productions in Ireland, Berlin and New York. In 2014 he adapted his debut play Hang Up directed by Gavin McEntree for screen, which premiered at Cork International Film Festival. A major Broadway production of his play Apartment Block is currently underway, directed by Tony Award Winner Connor Bagley and Heather Arnson. 

 

In 2019 Salmon Drama published his play 'This Is What Happened' which is prefaced with an essay called The Sacred Well about Wyeth's writing process. In the essay Wyeth equates his writing process to 'throwing toys out of the cot and then trying to assemble them into some semblance of order.' He continues, 'I very seldom plan anything I write; on the occasions when I have, the writing tends to flag, lacking substance and vigour, and my interest soon wanes. For me writing is all about finding a flow. there is a movement and excitement to the language, which drives me on.' Wyeth is an Associate Artist of the Civic theatre, Dublin, and in 2019 he became a member of Modernist Studies Ireland. He teaches Creative Writing online. 

 

His fifth collection, about:blank, was recently published with Salmon Poetry. The work was adapted into an audio-immersive piece directed by Eoghan Carrick and performed by Olwen Fouere, Owen Roe and Paula McGlinchey. It premiered at Dublin Theatre Festival 2021. 

 

He is co-founder with McGlinchey of Why on Earth Productions, which had its first production of solo-play Yoga For Beginners as part of the Scene & Heard work in development Festival at Smock Alley, 2016. He has also developed an accessible series of talk and creative writing workshops called The Mythic Imagination for participants of all writing levels. 

 

http://adamwyeth.com/ 

 

Photo credit: Ste Murray 

 

Enda Wyley was born in Dún Laoghaire, Co Dublin, and she holds an M.A in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. She currently lives in Dublin and  is an experienced primary teacher and member of Aosdána, the Irish affiliation of artists. 

She has published six collections of poetry with Dedalus Press; The Painter on his Bike, (2019), Borrowed Space, New and Selected Poems (2014), To Wake to This (2009), Poems for Breakfast (2004), Socrates in the Garden (1998), and Eating Baby Jesus (1993). She was the inaugural winner of the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize, Australia, and in 2014 she was awarded a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for her poetry.

Wyley’s poetry has been widely broadcast, translated and anthologised including in The Harvard Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry, Femmes d'Irlande en Poésie, 1973-2013;Anthologie bilingue, (ed. Clíona Ní Ríordáin), Lines of Vision, The National Gallery of Ireland.

She has collaborated with other artists on many arts projects in Ireland including The People’s Acorn/ Dearcán na nDaoine, with sculptor Rachel Joynt for Áras an Uachtaráin, the Official Residence of the President of Ireland. With the artist Anita Groener she also made the film-poem Home, for Bealtaine Festival. The music was performed by Colm Mac an Iomaire, and the film-poem toured arts venues and galleries throughout Ireland in 2018

Wyley’s books for children include I Won’t Go to China! And  The Silver Notebook, O’Brien Press. Her poetry for children has been included in anthologies such as Something Beginning with P (O’Brien Press) and Once Upon A Place, (ed. Eoin Colfer, Little Island).

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Listen to Enda Wyley read and talk about the title poem of her new collection, The Painter on his Bike, Dedalus Press.

https://www.rte.ie/culture/2019/0201/1026986-words-lightly-spoken-enda-wyley-reads-the-painter-on-his-bike/

 

(c) Photo: Irish Times / Matt Kavanagh