Meet the #DBF2020 Autumn Series Authors!
Published 21/10/2020
Christine Dwyer Hickey
Christine Dwyer Hickey is a novelist and short story writer. She has published 8 novels, one short story collection and a full-length play. Her latest novel The Narrow Land is the 2020 winner of the Walter Scott Prize and the inaugural winner of The Dalkey Literary Prize 2020. Her novel Tatty is the UNESCO Dublin One City One Book for 2020. She is a member of Aosdána.
Graham Norton
Graham Norton is an Irish television presenter, chat show host, comedian, and writer. He is best known for his popular British chat show, The Graham Norton Show, which won him The National Television Award in 2017. He also presents a radio show on BBC Radio 2, and has written the popular novels Holding, A Keeper and, now, Home Stretch.
Dr Marie Cassidy
Dr Marie Cassidy was Ireland’s State Pathologist from 2004 until 2018. During that time, she was involved in many high-profile cases, including the Stardust exhumation and the deaths of Siobhan Kearney, Rachel O’Reilly, Robert Holohan and Tom O’Gorman. Her memoir Beyond the Tape was published in October 2020 by Hachette Ireland.
Ellen Brickley
Ellen Brickley’s writing has appeared in The Irish Times, Inis and Women on Writing. She is currently working on an essay collection supported by the Arts Council of Ireland, and a contemporary young adult novel.(issues #2, #3, #5 & #10)
Tom Vowler
Tom Vowler is a novelist and short story writer living in south west England. His books include The Method, What Lies Within and That Dark Remembered Day. He is a lecturer in creative writing at Plymouth University, where he gained his PhD. Tom’s second collection of stories is titled Dazzling the Gods and his new novel, Every Seventh Wave, is forthcoming in 2021.
Marie Gethins
Marie Gethins’ flash appeared in Banshee, NFFD Anthologies, Flash, Jellyfish Review, Litro, NANO, Wales Arts Review, Synaesthesia, The Nottingham Review, Spelk, Ellipsis Zine, Paper Swans, 101 Words, Fictive Dream and others. Marie is a Pushcart and Best of the Short Fictions nominee and an editor of Irish ezine Splonk.
(issues #6 & #9)
Kevin Power
Kevin Power is the author of two novels, Bad Day in Blackrock and the forthcoming White City (Scribner UK, 2021). His writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Dublin Review, Literary Review, The Dublin Review of Books, The Irish Independent, and elsewhere. He is Assistant Professor of Literary Practice in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. (issue #6)
Bebe Ashley
Bebe Ashley lives in Belfast. She is an AHRC-funded PhD candidate at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry. Her work can be found in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Poetry Ireland Review, Modern Poetry in Translation, Poetry Jukebox and The Tangerine. Her debut collection, Gold Light Shining, is forthcoming from Banshee Press in October 2020.
(issue #9 & Gold Light Shining)
Abby Oliveira
Abby Oliveira is a writer & performer based in the North-West. In 2016 she toured her spoken-word show in Australia (supported by Arts Council NI), and was a featured writer at Singapore Writer’s Festival 2017. Her play Legends of the Coven premiered in 2018. She loves working collaboratively, and has done so with artists such as Mark Graham/King Kong Company, Basork, Tinderbox theatre company and many more.
Tapasya Narang
Tapasya Narang is a PhD student at the School of English, Dublin City University. Her work explores the connections between Irish and Indian contemporary poetry with particular focus on ephemeral publications like small-press literary magazines and chapbooks.
Evgeny Shtorn
Evgeny Shtorn is a writer, activist, and researcher from St Petersburg. Due to his involvement in civil society work he was forced to leave Russia in 2018. In 2019, he was granted international protection in the Republic of Ireland. He currently works as a Social and Cultural Diversity Consultant collaborating with different universities and organisations, and co-facilitates a project with people seeking asylum ‘Something From There’ in the National Gallery of Ireland. Evgeny’s writing has been published in academic journals, anthologies and new media outlets in Russia, Spain, Germany, and Ireland. As an activist, he has been involved in human rights and LGBT advocacy for almost two decades. He is a co-founder of Queer Diaspora Ireland, an initative that supports LGBT people in direct provision. In 2020, Shtorn was awarded the GALAs Person of the Year by the National LGBT Federation of Ireland (NXF).
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan
Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan is a Dublin-based arts manager, writer, and performer from India. She has been published in Writing Home: The ‘New Irish’ Poets, Honest Ulsterman, Banshee, and Poetry Ireland Review. Chandrika is currently guest editor of Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet, and book reviewer for Inis magazine. She has recently been shortlisted for the Fingal Poetry Prize.
Marita Conlon-McKenna
Marita Conlon-McKenna is one of Ireland’s favourite authors. Her books include the award-winning Under the Hawthorn Tree which is set during Ireland’s great famine. Widely translated and published, it is now considered an Irish classic. Her other books include bestsellers The Magdalen and Rebel Sisters. She is a winner of the International Reading Association Award, USA and a former chairperson of Irish PEN.
Marianne Lee
Marianne Lee grew up in Tullamore, Co. Offaly and now lives in Dublin with her husband. She has a degree in Visual Communications from the National College of Art and Design and an MPhil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. Marianne works as a designer and copywriter and has published a selection of poetry as well as self-recorded an album of music. She sings Bach and paints landscapes. A Quiet Tide is her first novel.
Sam Blake
Sam’s debut novel, Little Bones (Bonnier), not only launched the bestselling Cat Connolly trilogy, but was also number one in Ireland for four weeks, and was nominated for Irish Crime Novel of the Year in 2016. Moving away from police procedurals, Sam is keeping a focus on strong female characters, writing psychological thrillers for Atlantic Books. Keep Your Eyes On Me went straight to number one in January 2020 and The Dark Room is due in January 2021.
Jo Spain
Jo is the author of the bestselling DCI Tom Reynolds series, and standalones including the number one bestseller The Confession (Quercus). A full-time screen-writer, Jo created and co-wrote the critically acclaimed, groundbreaking RTÉ series Taken Down. She is currently working on a soon-to-be-broadcast TV series set in Cambridge, a new RTÉ thriller, and TV shows based in Finland, Iceland and London.
Roisin Kiberd
Roisin Kiberd has been published in the Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, the White Review, the Guardian and others, and wrote a column on internet subcultures for Vice. Her book, The Disconnect, will be published by Serpent’s Tail in 2021.
Tim MacGabhann
Tim MacGabhann is the author of Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere. His fiction, non-fiction, and poetry also appear in gorse, The Stinging Fly, and the Dublin Review. He lives in Mexico City.
Kerri Ní Dochartaigh
Kerri ní Dochartaigh lives in an old stone railway cottage in the middle of Ireland. She writes about nature, literature, and place. Her first book, Thin Places, will be published by Canongate in January 2021.
Kevin Barry
Kevin Barry is the author of three novels and three short story collections, including most recently Night Boat to Tangier and That Old Country Music. He also writes plays and screenplays. He lives in Co Sligo.
Celia de Fréine
Celia de Fréine is a poet, playwright and screenwriter who writes in Irish and English. Her books include the critically acclaimed Fiacha Fola (Cló lar-Chonnacta), an extraordinary sequence of poems written through the eyes of a woman affected by the hepatitis C scandal. Of it, the Irish Examiner declared, her ‘narrator sings in a voice as eloquent as the psalms’. Her latest collection is I bhFreagairt ar Rilke/In Response to Rilke (Arlen House), a series of poems written during a residency in the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris, where she immersed herself in Rilke’s poems written in French during the time he worked for the sculptor Rodin.
Theo Dorgan
Theo Dorgan is a poet, and also a non-fiction prose writer, novelist, editor, documentary screenwriter, essayist, librettist and translator. His recent poetry collections include Orpheus and Nine Bright Shiners (both Dedalus Press), with the latter winning the Irish Times Poetry Now Award in 2015, being described by the judges as a ‘luminous book, in which moments of personal connection carry lasting significance’. His translation of Lorca’s Romancero Gitano into Irish, Bailéid Giofógacha, was published by Coiscéim in 2019.
Caitríona Ní Chlérichín
Caitríona Ní Chlérichín is one of Ireland’s most exciting new poets. Her collections include Crithloinnir and An Bhrídeach Sí (both Coiscéim), as well as the recently published bilingual selection of her work, The Talk of the Town (Gallery Books), featuring English language versions by Peter Fallon. The judges of the Michael Hartnett Award for Poetry in 2015 highlighted her poetry as ‘powerful, courageous, sassy and important . . . Her mastery of Irish and sense of being at home in tradition and modernity is evident in poems set in the 17th century, poems framed by Gaelic mythology and in intensely personal lyrics. The poems are full of passion.’ She has also translated classical poets Sappho and Ovid for multi-media productions at the IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival.
Denise Mina
Denise Mina is the author of the Garnethill trilogy, the Paddy Meehan series and the Alex Morrow series. She has won the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award twice and was inducted into the Crime Writers’ Association Hall of Fame in 2014. The Long Drop, her latest novel, won the McIlvanney Prize for Scottish Crime Book of the Year and the Gordon Burn Prize. Denise has also written plays and graphic novels, and presented television and radio programmes.
Liz Nugent
Liz Nugent is a writer of number 1 bestselling novels Unravelling Oliver (2014), Lying in Wait (2016), Skin Deep (2018) and Our Little Cruelties (2020). Her first three books have won multiple Irish Book Awards. All four have also been optioned for screen adaptations. Liz’s books have been translated into 16 languages.
Professor Luke O’Neill
Professor Luke O’Neill is a world-renowned immunologist and Professor of Biochemistry in the School of Biochemistry and Immunology at Trinity College Dublin. In 2016 he was made a fellow of the Royal Society for his innovative work on the human immune system. He has a popular weekly slot on Newstalk’s Pat Kenny Show and is the author of two bestselling books, Humanology and The Great Irish Science Book for children, also published by Gill Books. Sit back and let Luke bring the science to you!