You can watch my interview with current Booker Prize-winner Douglas Stuart for Jaipur Literature Festival 2021 which is now online here.
I hope you enjoy it.
Diving Deep with Douglas Stuart: The Many Layers of Shuggie Bain
author interview
Interviewing Bryan Washington
April 24, 2021, 12:30pm Cúirt International Festival of Literature
ONLINE (YOUTUBE) / PAY WHAT YOU CAN
“A thoughtful, witty and heartfelt debut novel, Bryan Washington’s Memorial explores the challenges of intimacy, hard-won vulnerability and building relationships while dealing with your own shit. Fans of Sally Rooney will enjoy Memorial, a story about relationships and what binds us together. When Mike finds out his estranged father is dying, he leaves to visit him in Japan just as his mother arrives to visit, leaving her in the incapable hands of his live-in boyfriend, Benson. He and Mitsuko become unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that is at once moving and hilarious.”
“Bryan Washington is a writer from Houston. His fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, the BBC, Vulture and The Paris Review. He is also a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 winner, the recipient of an Ernest J. Gaines Award, a PEN/Robert W. Bingham prize finalist, a National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize finalist, the recipient of an O. Henry Award and the winner of the 2020 International Dylan Thomas Prize.
Bryan is joined in conversation by Paul McVeigh.”
‘A new vision for the 21st-century novel. It made me happy.’ Ocean Vuong
Review of my Interview w/ Booker Winner Douglas Stuart at Jaipur Literature Festival
What an incredible, generous review – ‘Booker Prizes winner Douglas Stuart’s conversation with writer Paul McVeigh on Day 3 of the Jaipur Literature Festival encapsulated what this virtual edition gets right.’
If you missed the interview you can read this very detailed review and captures the intimacy so well.
Reading and Q&A for Uni of Worcester
by University of Worcester Creative Writing Course
Join us to hear Paul McVeigh read from his novel ‘The Good Son’ and take part in a Q&A about his writing career and creative practice.
7.30 pm
16th February 2021
Free
Register to get sent an online link before the event.
This event is hosted by the Creative Writing course at the University of Worcester.
It is free to attend: designed to enable students, staff and members of the public to access authors reading their work and talking about their creative practice & writing careers.
Please register and you will then be sent the link before the event.
For more information please contact Ruth Stacey: r.stacey@worc.ac.uk
and follow us on Twitter to find out about future events: @uowriting
The Good Son: Won The Polari Prize & The McCrea Literary Award
“The Good Son is a work of genius from a splendid writer.”
Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler
“A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.” Donal Ryan
Praise for The Good Son:
“The Good Son gave us one of the most engaging protagonists of the year in Mickey Donnelly, who occupies a space between whimsy and horror in Troubles-era Belfast.” Bailey’s Prize-winner Lisa McInerney Top Reads of 2015 The Irish Independent
“When I think of exceptional working-class novels from the last few years, I inevitably think of Kit de Waal’s My Name Is Leon and Paul McVeigh’s The Good Son.” The Observer
“Paul McVeigh has written a first novel of beautiful generosity, poignant in the delicate manner in which he evokes the brutality of an era. A striking fresco, mixing historical upheavals and hardships of a family shattered.” Le Monde
“Blackly hilarious (with) one of the most endearing and charming characters I’ve come across in a long time.” ELLE Magazine Best of 2015
Listen Share Change Xmas Reading
LISTEN SHARE CHANGE PROJECT
A while ago I did an event Crumlin Road Gaol, Belfast, for this project.
Listen Share Change is a partnership between Northern Ireland Housing Executive and Verbal Arts Centre. A four year Peace IV-funded project running until 2022, bringing communities together with shared reading and conversation. It aims to build positive relations between people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds.
This Friday I’m doing an event for their volunteers, reading my own Xmas story ‘Malibu Barbie Christmas’, and talking about writing with them.
The Good Son: Won The Polari Prize & The McCrea Literary Award
“The Good Son is a work of genius from a splendid writer.”
Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler
“A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.” Donal Ryan
Podcast: Kit de Waal for Birmingham Literature Festival
Today I recorded my first podcast interviewing Kit de Waal about her work especially her new short fiction collection ‘Supporting Cast’ for Birmingham Literature Festival.
Look out for it coming this October.
The Good Son: Winner of The Polari Prize & The McCrea Literary Award
“The Good Son is a work of genius from a splendid writer.”
Pulitzer Prize-winner Robert Olen Butler
“A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.” Donal Ryan
Garth Greenwell Interview in Irish Times
After debut success, Garth Greenwell returns to the ‘pit of despair’
To Garth Greenwell, the huge international success of his debut What Belongs to You, “was the biggest surprise of my life”, and he feels “immensely lucky” as “the success of a book has as much to do with chance as anything else”. Its success has allowed him to have a career as a writer and teacher in a way he wasn’t able to in his previous 20 years of writing. He feels relieved, though, that the writing process itself, “the struggle”, just him alone with his notebook and “the pit of doubt and despair”, hasn’t changed. “I wouldn’t know who I would be without it.”
You can read my interview with him about his new novel, Cleanness, in The Irish Times.
Interviewing Anne Enright
Anne Enright in Conversation
I’m excited to interview Man Booker Prize Winner Anne Enright for the second time, this time on home turf. The first time was in Waterstones Piccadilly for Word Factory earlier this year. We also sat on some panels together whilst at a literature festival in Morges, Switzerland.
Next February 9th, I’ll be interviewing her at the Seamus Heaney Homeplace, here’s the blurb…
‘Booker Prize-winning novelist Anne Enright is one of the most celebrated writers working in Ireland today. Her work is part of a great tradition of Irish writing that explores themes of family life, relationships, love, repression and memory.
Enright won the 2007 Booker Prize for her novel The Gathering, a story about the pull of family and the lure of home. Her first novel was The Wig My Father Wore and subsequent works have included What Are You Like?, The Forgotten Waltz and her most recent The Green Road. Her awards also include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Encore Award and the Irish Novel of the Year.
From 2015 to 2018 she was the inaugural Laureate for Irish Fiction and we are delighted to welcome her to The Helicon where she will talk about her work and career with Paul McVeigh.’
Come along, it should be a wonderful night.
Interviewing Sarah Perry
An Evening with Sarah Perry
Thursday 22nd November 19:00 – 21:00
at Crescent Arts Centre Cube, 2-4 University Road, Belfast , BT7 1NH
I’ll be interviewing the wonderful Sarah Perry in Belfast in November. I read with Sarah a few years back at a festival in Ballycastle, Northern Ireland. Here’s what Waterstones said…
“We are thrilled to welcome Sarah Perry, the author of 2016’s Waterstones Book of the YearThe Essex Serpent, to Belfast in conversation with Paul McVeigh to discuss her new novel Melmoth.
Sarah Perry is the UK’s most extraordinary writer of Gothic literature. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Royal Holloway. She has been the writer in residence at Gladstone’s Library and the UNESCO World City of Literature Writer in Residence in Prague. After Me Comes the Flood, her first novel, was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award and the Folio Prize, and won the East Anglian Book of the Year Award in 2014. Her latest novel, The Essex Serpent, was a number one bestseller in hardback, Waterstones Book of the Year 2016, the British Book Awards Book of the Year 2017, was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and Dylan Thomas Award, and longlisted for the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction 2017.
Melmoth is a profound, ambitiously realised work of fiction which asks fundamental questions about guilt, forgiveness, moral reckoning and how we come to terms with our actions in a conflicted world. A compulsive, terrifying and thoroughly modern Gothic novel, and a response to the Irish Gothic classic Melmoth the Wanderer.
Further details: 020892040159″
14 Sept, Interviewing Chris Power
Chris Power in conversation with Paul McVeigh
10pm, Firkin Crane Theatre (€5)
Chris Power lives and works in London. His ‘Brief Survey of the Short Story’ has appeared in the Guardian since 2007. His fiction has been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review and The White Review. Mothers is his first book.
The Good Son, Paul McVeigh’s debut novel, won The Polari Prize and The McCrea Literary Award. It was shortlisted for The Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award, the Prix du Roman Cezam in France and a finalist for The People’s Book Prize. The Good Sonwas chosen as Brighton’s City Reads 2016 and was given out as part of World Book Night 2017. Paul has written comedy, essays, flash fiction, a novel, plays and short stories, and his work has been performed on stage and radio, and published in seven languages.
The Good Son 