Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy, Co. Wexford in Ireland in 1955 and was educated at University College Dublin where he read History and English. After graduating, he lived and taught in Barcelona, a city that he later wrote about in Homage to Barcelona (1990). He returned to Ireland and worked as a journalist before travelling through South America and Argentina. He is the author of a number of works of fiction and non-fiction and is a regular contributor to various newspapers and magazines. He was awarded the E. M.
Claire Kilroy's debut novel All Summer was described in The Times as 'compelling ... a thriller, a confession and a love story framed by a meditation on the arts', and was awarded the 2004 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Her second novel, Tenderwire was shortlisted for the 2007 Irish Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award. It was followed, in 2009, by the highly acclaimed novel, All Names Have Been Changed and by 2012's The Devil I Know.
Sarah Clancy is a page and performance poet from Galway. Her most recent collection 'The Truth and Other Stories' and was published by Salmon Poetry in 2014. She has two previous collections to her name, Stacey and the Mechanical Bull (Lapwing Press, Belfast, 2011) and Thanks for Nothing, Hippies. (Salmon Poetry, 2012).
Born in Cork, Irish poet, translator, and editor Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is the daughter of a writer and a professor who fought in the Irish War of Independence. She earned a BA and MA at University College Cork and also studied at Oxford University.
Born in Dublin in 1959, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known writers. His thirteen previous novels include The Journey Home, Father’s Music, The Valparaiso Voyage, The Family on Paradise Pier, A Second Life, New Town Soul, The Fall of Ireland, Tanglewood, The Lonely Sea and Sky and his most recent An Ark of Light, published in 2018.
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collections, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press) and The Last Resort (2021), a micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019 and won the EU Prize for Literature.
Maureen Boyle lives in Belfast. She began writing as a child in Sion Mills, County Tyrone, winning a UNESCO medal for a book of poems in 1979 at eighteen. She studied in Trinity in Dublin and in 2005 was awarded the Master’s in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast. She has won various awards including the Ireland Chair of Poetry Prize in 2007 and the Strokestown International Poetry Prize in the same year. In 2013 she won the Fish Short Memoir Prize.
Maria McManus was born between the bridges of Enniskillen, Co. Fermanagh. A poet and playwright, Maria lives in Belfast. She is the author of Available Light (Arlen House, 2018), We are Bone (2013), The Cello Suites (2009) and Reading the Dog (2006) (Lagan Press). Her writing for theatre includes work with Kabosh, TinderBox, Red Lead, Replay, Big Telly and Off the Rails, a dance company.
Ruth Carr was born in Belfast where she lives and works as a freelance tutor and editor, concerned with raising the profile of women in literature. In 1985 she edited The Female Line, the first anthology of women’s writing to come out of Northern Ireland (Northern Ireland Women’s Rights Movement, Belfast, relaunched as an e-book with herpress in 2016).
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