Girlhood Remixed Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan, Rosamund Taylor and Jessica Traynor in conversation with Ellen Orchard

In Partnership with MoLI - Museum of Literature Ireland

Join us for readings and discussion with three writers whose work captures experiences of girlhood and womanhood. Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan’s debut poetry collection The Salt of Something (Dedalus Press) explores love, attraction, excitement and disappointment, responding to the city both as homeplace and site of ongoing discoveries and negotiations. Jessica Traynor’s poetry collection New Arcana (Bloodaxe Books) explores grief, bad boyfriends and the power of female friendship through readings of the Tarot and Tim Burton movies. Rosamund Taylor’s Filly (Banshee Press) is a queer coming-of-age verse novel shot through with readings of cult literary classics. The writers join writer and critic Ellen Orchard in conversation.

This event is part of First Fridays at MoLI – Museum of Literature Ireland. Entry is free but events throughout the evening operate on a first-come, first-served basis. Please visit the MoLI website for full details. 

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is an Indian-Irish writer, performer, and cultural consultant. Her work has been published by New Island, Banshee, Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland, and others. She often works with poetry as a method of science communication and was the 2023 Writer in Residence for the Institute of Physics and a 2024 Goethe-Institut Studio Quantum Artist in Residence. She is a Skein Press Play it Forward Fellow, and her debut poetry collection The Salt of Something was published with Dedalus Press this year.

Rosamund Taylor is the winner of the Rialto Poetry Prize 2025, the Telegraph Poetry Prize 2023, The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2020 and the Mairtín Crawford Award for Poetry 2017. In 2023, her debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection and the Yeats Society Poetry Prize, and longlisted for the Polari First Book Prize. Her essays have recently appeared in The Irish Times and The Stinging Fly, and her poems have featured in Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Mslexia, Poetry Ireland Review and on BBC Radio 4 and RTE Radio 1.

Jessica Traynor is a poet and poetry editor at Banshee. Her debut, Liffey Swim (Dedalus Press, 2014), was shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. Her second collection, The Quick (Dedalus Press, 2019), was a 2019 Irish Times book of the year. Her third, Pit Lullabies, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2022. It was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation and was an Irish Times poetry book of the year. Pit Lullabies was shortlisted for the inaugural Yeats Society Sligo Poetry Prize. New Arcana was published by Bloodaxe in 2025 and was an RTÉ and Irish Independent Book of the Year. It was shortlisted for the Pigott Prize in association with Listowel Writers Week. Awards include the Hennessy New Writer of the Year, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and the Listowel Poetry Prize, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Tundish Award from Field Day.

Ellen Orchard (she/her) holds a PhD on childhood in modern Irish poetry from Trinity College Dublin, where she was an Irish Research Council Postgraduate Scholar for four years. Her poetry criticism can be found in the Stinging Fly, the Australasian Journal of Irish Studies and the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies. She is currently writing and working in Dublin, as a bookseller.  

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