'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.

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.

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.

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.

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). 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.