The Art of the Short Story Niamh Mac Cabe and John O’Donnell in conversation with Niall MacMonagle

In Partnership with dlr Libraries

As short stories continue to captivate, join us as we delve into two striking collections by award-winning writers. Niamh Mac Cabe’s Four Night Seas (Lilliput Press) features characters navigating emotional or existential thresholds – grieving, seeking meaning or reconciling with the past  – in this collection that blurs the line between the internal and external world. John O’Donnell’s Mr Hoo and Other Stories (Doire Press) features compelling stories of schemers and survivors, of almost-winners and not-quite losers, in this collection that movingly examines the human condition. The authors will join writer and critic Niall MacMonagle to discuss their writing process, and the power of the short story to explore universal themes from loneliness and desire, to memory, loss and human connection.

Niamh Mac Cabe is an award-winning writer of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, plays, and hybrid prose. She is also a visual artist, an editor, and a lecturer on the Honours Degree in Writing & Literature, the Honours Degree in Performing Arts, and the Masters in Creative Practice at ATU Sligo. Dublin-born, she worked overseas for several years in the Animated Film industry before ‘settling’ in northwestern Ireland. 

John O’Donnell has won the Irish National Poetry Prize, the New Irish Writing Awards for Poetry and Fiction, and in 2023 the RTE Francis McManus Short Story Award for his story ‘Mr Hoo’. He has published five poetry collections. His collection of short stories Almost the Same Blue (Doire Press) was nominated as one of the Debut Books of the Year in the Irish Times and was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Rainbow Baby, a play for radio, was broadcast on RTE’s Drama On One and won a prize at the New York Festivals Radio Awards. A documentary he co-produced about the Fastnet Yacht Race disaster of 1979, Back To The Rock, was broadcast on RTE Radio’s The Doc On One. His debut novel, Second Skin, was one of the winners of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair 2024. He lives and works in Dublin.

Niall MacMonagle, writer and critic, has edited several anthologies, including the Lifeline series, the Poetry Now textbooks, Windharp, Poems of Ireland since 1916 and Paul Durcan 80 at 80. He writes a weekly art column for the Sunday Independent and in 2017 was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by UCD for Services to Literature.

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