Out on the Page Soula Emmanuel, Seán Hewitt and Anne Walsh Donnelly in conversation with Neil Hegarty

In Partnership with Irish Writers Centre

As representations of LGBTQAI+ lives and experiences enter the publishing mainstream, join us to discuss the importance of queer visibility in writing, and the many ways in which such representation can work, serve our community – and shine a light in a still-challenging world.

Anne Walsh Donnelly writes poetry, prose and plays. Anne explores the rural Irish experience in her writing and is not afraid to take risks. She is the author of He Used To Be Me, published by New Island in 2024. Her poetry collection, Odd as F*ck, was published in 2021 by Fly on the Wall Poetry Press along with her poetry chapbook, The Woman With An Owl Tattoo, which is a poetic memoir of her coming out journey in her fifties and was awarded second prize in the International Poetry Book Awards in 2020. She has written several plays, some of which explore the rural Irish LGBTQ+ experience. Her one-act play My Dead Husband’s Hereford Bull, was awarded a bursary by the Dublin Gay Theatre Festival in 2020. Poetry Ireland, in conjunction with Mayo Arts Office, appointed her as Poet Laureate for the town of Belmullet, Co Mayo, in 2021.

Seán Hewitt is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and has been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the
Year Award and the Dylan Thomas Prize. His debut novel, Open, Heaven, was published this year. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Soula Emmanuel was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Greek father. She studied at universities in Ireland and Sweden, emerging with a master’s in demography. She currently lives on Ireland’s east coast. Her debut novel Wild Geese was published in 2023. In 2024, it won the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, and the Gordon Bowker Volcano Prize at the UK Society of Authors Awards.

Neil Hegarty grew up in Derry. His novels include The Jewel; and Inch Levels, which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year award. Neil’s non-fiction titles include the biography Frost: That Was the Life That Was, and The Story of Ireland, which accompanies the RTE-BBC television history of Ireland. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Cyphers, Tangerine, Banshee, and elsewhere; and he is co-editor of the essay collection Impermanence, which has been adapted for radio by RTE. He is a regular literary reviewer on the
Irish Times.