Meet the #DBF2016 Team!

These friendly faces will be on-site to welcome you to Dublin Book Festival 2016:

Julianne Mooney – Programme Director

Background: Julianne has been programming the Dublin Book Festival since 2010 and has loved every moment of it. Alongside the festival, she has worked at The Ark, is author of The Time Out Guide to Ireland and Reader-in-Residence for Dublin City Public Libraries and DLR Libraries. She considers herself incredibly lucky to work in the world of books – reading has been her favourite pastime ever since she was a little girl and could hold a book in her hands.

Fave Book: “I hate this question. I read so many books for work and pleasure it is so difficult to choose one. Saying that, I have always loved magic realism and it was Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and later, Isabel Allende who ignited my passion for it. When I was twelve my Mum handed me Wild Swans by Jung Chang and while slightly overwhelmed by the size of it, it quickly became my favourite book and the reason I love historical fiction today.”

Leah Leslie – Marketing and Administration Executive

Background: Leah studied illustration at Central Saint Martins School of Art and Design, and has a degree in Book Arts and Design from London College of Communication, which merged her love of literature with art. She’s currently completing an MA in Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship at Goldsmiths, University of London.

She has worked in editorial, digital marketing, and the non-profit Graphic Studio Gallery in Dublin. Her writing has been published by IMAGE Interiors & Living Magazine, The Irish Times, xoJane and more. For five years, she worked for the international blogging platform Tumblr as Top Editor for DIY and Crafts. Her popular book arts blog has over 90,000 followers (read Leah’s interview about her blog with the Centre for the History of the Book here).

In her spare time, Leah enjoys reading, writing, drawing, cooking, traveling, and forcing her cat to spend time with her.

Fave Book: “My copy of Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov is dog-eared and disintegrating from reading it so much. It’s a horror story masterfully told by a manipulative narrator trying to repackage his abuse towards a young girl as a rose-tinted love story. As a child, I would pour over Kay Nielsen’s stunning Golden Age illustrations in East of the Sun and West of the Moon, a magical book I wanted to live in.”

Carol Taaffe – Marketing & Admin Assistant

Background: Carol was an IRCHSS Post-Doctoral Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and in September 2016 completed an M.Sc. in Interactive Digital Media in TCD, with distinction. She now speaks computer. Bringing a literary background to training in web design, programming, 3D modelling and A/V production, over the past summer she worked with a team to create six short VR animations – a project which she calls ‘an experiment in multi-platform storytelling’. Unsurprisingly, she previously worked in academia. Carol has published books on Flann O’Brien and modernism, and is a contributor to The Dublin Review and the Dublin Review of Books.

Fave Book: “I can’t pick favourites! I recently finished Ed O’Loughlin’s Minds of Winter, a very clever novel that weaves together the journeys of polar explorers over the centuries. I’m just beginning a very different book on the perils of travel: The New Odyssey by Patrick Kingsley, the Guardian‘s first migration correspondent. It’s an account of Europe’s refugee crisis told through personal stories – a gripping and sobering piece of reportage.”

Keelin Murray – Marketing & Admin Assistant

Background: Keelin has always been a prolific reader – a fond childhood memory is of a family trip to Hodges Figgis and being allowed to choose two whole books all by herself! Keelin has a degree in music and linguistics from UCD, and in 2008 moved to Edinburgh to do a Masters in the evolution of language and cognition. She loved the city so much that she stayed on to do a PhD in language evolution, before working as a postdoc in the universities of Durham and St Andrews. Her PhD thesis focused on the evolution of music and language, and her postdoctoral research was on human social learning and cross-cultural differences in learning styles.

After moving home in the summer, Keelin decided to revisit her first love. As well as working for Dublin Book Festival, she currently works for Children’s Books Ireland, the national children’s books charity. She is loving building a network and community in the arts back home.

Fave Book: “That’s a horrible question! At the top might be Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible. It’s an amazing examination of the arrogance and fallibility of man, told from the perspective of a young girl who is brought to the Belgian Congo by her missionary parents. I also love American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld – I find her characters have a realistic inner monologue. And Nora Webster by Colm Toibín for the way he writes the simmering resentment and chafing that so many Irish women felt at their restricted and prescribed lives. I can have three favourites, right?”