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