I’ll be visiting The Outing Festival at the Inn at Dromoland, Co. Clare, Ireland.
I’ll be reading from The Good Son and talking to Kitty Murphy on Saturday 15th February.
“An LGBT+ Weekend like no other!” The Outing Festival is a fusion of music, comedy, ceilí bands, queer arts, and the best of Ireland’s and International performers, drag artists and DJs plus so much more for over 10 Years”
Donal Ryan has rapidly become one of Irelands most celebrated authors. Join Donal as he talks about his new book, Heart, Be at Peace, and his career, with author Paul McVeigh.
Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, is the author of six number one-bestselling novels and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and four Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award and the Dublin International Literary Award. He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea. In 2016 his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, was voted Irish Book of the Decade. In 2021 he became the first Irish writer to be awarded the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. A law graduate and former civil servant, Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children. His seventh novel, Heart, Be At Peace, will be published worldwide in August 2024.
Paul McVeigh’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize, The McCrea Literary Award and was shortlisted for many others including the Prix de Roman Cezam. His short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, journals and newspapers, as well as, on BBC Radio 3, 4 & 5, and Sky Arts. He edited the Queer Love anthology and The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices. His writing has been translated into seven languages.
His collection of short stories written for BBC Radio, I Hear You, will be published by Salt Publishing in March 2025.
| Date | Wednesday October 16th |
| Venue | Rathfarnham Castle |
| Admission | €10 / €8 |
| Time | 7pm |
Kit de Waal in Conversation with Paul McVeigh
The Market Place Theatre and Arts Centre
Monday 22 July | 1.30pm | £10
03300561025
Fiction
Kit de Waal, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father, was brought up in a household of opposites and extremes among the Irish community of Birmingham in the ‘60s and ‘70s The best-selling author of novels, short stories, anthologies, and radio dramas, her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award, longlisted for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. In 2022 it was adapted for television by the BBC.
Her second novel, The Trick to Time, was longlisted for the Women’s Prize and her young adult novel Becoming Dinah was shortlisted for the Carnegie CLIP Award 2020. A prolific writer, she has also published an anthology of working-class memoir, Common People (2019), crowdfunded and edited by Kit, a collection of short stories, Supporting Cast (2020), and a memoir Without Warning and Only Sometimes (2022). A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her new novel Best of Everything will be released in April 2025. kitdewaal.com/
Paul McVeigh is the acclaimed author of the novel, The Good Son. A Co-founder of the London Short Story Festival, his 2023 play, Big Man, premiered at the Lyric Theatre Belfast. paulmcveighwriter.com/
Celebrating the book’s tenth anniversary and his historic prize win, James takes the stage to discuss his work to date and how the success of A Brief History of Seven Killings shaped the trajectory of his writing career.
On December 3rd 1976 at around 8:30 PM, seven men armed with guns broke into 56 Hope Road where Bob Marley and his band were rehearsing for an upcoming gig. The gunmen managed to shoot Marley’s wife, his manager, a band employee, and Marley himself before fleeing the scene. Later, the gunmen would be tried and executed in a ghetto court with both the singer and his manager present.
A Brief History of Seven Killings reimagines this defining moment in the singer-songwriter’s storied life and career. Spanning three decades, its cast of characters range from drug dealers to journalists, ghosts to the CIA as they navigate the streets of 1970s Kingston, the crack houses of 1980s New York, and the radically altered Jamaica of the 1990s.
This masterpiece of speculative fiction won Marlon James the 2015 Man Booker Prize, making him the first ever Jamaican writer to win the prize. In this event celebrating the book’s tenth anniversary and his historic prize win, James takes the stage to discuss Marley’s legacy, his work to date, and how the success of the book shaped the trajectory of his writing career.
Marlon James is the author of the New York Times-bestseller Black Leopard, Red Wolf. A Brief History of Seven Killings won the 2015 Man Booker Prize, the OCM Bocas Prize for Caribbean Literature for fiction, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for fiction, and the Minnesota Book Award. His other publications include The Book of Night Women and John Crow’s Devil.
This event will be chaired by writer Paul McVeigh, Paul’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Prize and The McCrea Literary Award. His short stories have appeared in anthologies, journals and his writing has been translated into seven languages.
Sat 25 May
19:00
Merrion Square Park – Speranza
€20 / €18
Monday, July 24, 2023 @ 07:00 PM Armagh – Book here.
Billy O’Callaghan is amongst the finest storytellers and wordsmiths in Ireland today.” Anne Griffin
Billy O’Callaghan from Corkis the award-winning author of four short story collections and four novels including the internationally acclaimed My Coney Island Baby andthe COSTA shortlisted and bestseller Life Sentences. His most recent novel (May, 2023), The Paper Man, is a sweeping and unforgettable interwar love story (Publisher: J Cape UK)
Based on true events, The Paper Man is the story of twentieth-century Europe and love against the odds. It is a story that will take Jack Shine far from Cork and all the way back to Vienna, and towards Matthias Sindelar, known as “The Paper Man”, one of the most famous footballers in the world in the 1930s. billyocallaghan.ie/
Join me on Saturday 17th June for an evening at Lit Books in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. I’ll be speaking to Fong Min Hun about my debut novel, The Good Son.
Details and tickets can be found here.
Winner of The Polari First Novel Prize
‘A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.’ Donal Ryan
‘Raw, funny and endlessly entertaining’. Jonathan Coe
****PLEASE NOTE: the time of this event as printed in the programme is incorrect. The event is 7pm – 8pm. Oct 7th.****
Two memoirs set in the same part of Birmingham: geographically, very close – but culturally, miles apart.
Kit de Waal grew up to a white Irish mother and Black Caribbean father in 1960s Springfield, South Birmingham, with 4 siblings, not enough
food and huge expectations imposed by her Jehovah’s Witness mother. Not 3 miles away, 15 years later, Osman Yousefzada grew up in a
closed-off Pakistani immigrant community where everyone knew his and his family’s business and he and his siblings – especially
his sisters – were under permanent scrutiny.
Kit and Osman join us at Birmingham Literature Festival in the year both their memoirs have been published to talk about their childhoods in the city, their families, and how that set them on the track to stride out and break with expectations to forge their own careers and lives.
Chaired by Paul McVeigh
Sponsored by Newman University
About the speakers:
Kit de Waal is the author of the novels My Name is Leon, which was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and The Trick to Time, which was longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, and a short story collection, Supporting Cast. She is also editor of the Common People anthology, and co-founder of the Big Book Weekend festival. My Name is Leon was adapted as a one-hour film for BBC1, and broadcast in June 2022 to rave reviews.
Osman Yousefzada was born in Birmingham to migrant parents who are illiterate in English and their mother tongue. He is an interdisciplinary artist and designer who studied at SOAS and Central Saint Martins, and went on to obtain an MPhil at Cambridge University. He has exhibited at international institutions including the Whitechapel Gallery, Dhaka Art Summit, V&A and more. The Osman Yousefzada clothing line is worn by celebrities including Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Lupita Nyong’o, Thandiwe Newton, Gwen Stefani, Emma Watson, Freida Pinto and many more.
The Price of Privilege: Damon Galgut
I’ll be meeting Damon Galgut to discuss his writing and his Booker Prize-winning novel The Promise at the International Literary Festival Dublin on May 24. Check it out here.
“As a literary form, the novel has a unique capacity to capture the realities of life. The things we shouldn’t forget. A good novelist understands this. A great novelist takes this knowledge and uses the form to do something unexpected. Damon Galgut was praised by the Booker Prize judges for exactly this feat in 2021 when The Promise was awarded the prestigious prize. Set on a farm on the outskirts of Pretoria, and focusing on a seemingly ordinary family in crisis, Galgut’s novel asks relentless questions of the past and the present, and of the ways in which we deny ourselves and each other when confronted with truth.
Damon Galgut is a South African author, based in Capetown. The author of nine novels, he was twice nominated for the Booker Prize before winning it in 2021 for The Promise.
‘A masterpiece…A moving, brilliantly told family epic’ – Elizabeth Day
**Please note that you also have the option to watch this event live from the comfort of your own home. Make sure you select “Book Online Event” if you wish to do so.**”
‘Following a successful UK tour in 2019, the bestselling, much-loved author and LGBT activist, Armistead Maupin is bringing his brand new show to Belfast.
Maupin has been blazing a trail through US popular culture since the 1970’s, when his iconic and ground-breaking series Tales of the Citywas first published as a column in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The novel series has been taking the literary world by storm ever since, and was recently adapted by Netflix into a critically acclaimed series, starring Laura Linney, Olympia Dukakis and Elliot Page.
Paul McVeigh 