Cat Brogan won the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Poetry Slam, featured on Radio 4 and Ireland’s RTE. She holds a master’s in creative writing and education from Goldsmiths and was a full-time spoken word educator in London. Cat received Arts Council England and British Council grants to research spoken word education in Kuala Lumpur. She has presented her work at academic conferences, published in a journal, and has a TEDx Talk. From Northern Ireland, she has performed in 17 countries.

Abby Oliveira is a performance poet, writer and actor based in Derry. She has performed her poetry at the Lingo festival, Glastonbury, Electric Picnic, the Dublin and Belfast book festivals, and elsewhere. She was the 2014 and 2015 Lingo poetry slam champion. In 2016, she received two Arts Council of Northern Ireland awards to write a solo show, Cast Away Your Compass, and tour it in Australia. She is currently working on her first play and her first poetry collection.

Julian Gough is the author of three novels, two children’s books, two radio plays, a stage play, a book of poetry, and the ending to the computer game Minecraft. He has won the BBC National Short Story Award and been shortlisted for an Irish Book of the Year Award, a Sainsbury’s Children’s Book Award, and the Everyman Bollinger Wodehouse Prize. His latest novel, Connect, will be published next year. He is a writer-in-residence at Nanyang Technological University.

Irish short story writer Claire Keegan has published the collections Antarctica (1999) and Walk the Blue Fields (2007), as well as the story ‘Foster’ as a standalone book (2010). She has been translated into 15 languages and won numerous awards. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize in 2008, awarded to the strongest collection published in the British Isles, while ‘Foster’ won the 2009 Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award, then the world’s richest prize for a single story.

Deirdre Sullivan is a writer and teacher from Galway, Ireland. She has published four novels: the Primrose Leary trilogy (2010, 2013, 2014) and Needlework (2016). Her books have previously been shortlisted for the EU Prize for Literature, the Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book of the Year, and the Children’s Books Ireland awards. Needlework received a White Raven in 2016. Deirdre’s next book, a collection of dark fairytale retellings called Tangleweed and Brine, comes out this year.

Deborah Emmanuel is a Singaporean writer, performer, and four-time TEDx speaker. Her performance work has taken her to places such as Melbourne, Berlin, London, Bali and Kathmandu​​. ​Deborah​ has published the poetry collection When I Giggle in My Sleep (2015) and the memoir Rebel Rites (2016). When not writing or performing poetry, she is an actor​ on stage and screen,​​ and​ makes music with her bands Wobology and The Ditha Project​.​

Between Brexit and the Deep Blue Sea: Being Irish in a Divided Europe

Panel Discussions