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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.