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 the 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.

Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, three collections of short stories, several stage plays and radio dramas, and is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019).

John McAuliffe has published six books with The Gallery Press, most recently Selected Poems (2021), 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.

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.

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

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.