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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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