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/

BOOK NOW

Focus on: Northern Ireland –

Darran Anderson & Wendy Erskine

8th October, 8pm Birmingham Rep

Northern Ireland – often overlooked, or dismissed as “troublesome” – has generated some of the best contemporary writing in the English language.

Invited by Guest Curator Paul McVeigh, Darran Anderson and Wendy Erskine are some of the most exciting new literary voices coming out of the nation, and they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Come and find out what wonderful fiction you’ve been missing out on, and who you should be looking out for next.

Chaired by Paul McVeigh

About the speakers:

Darran Anderson is an Irish writer living in London. He is the author of Imaginary Cities and Inventory. He has co-edited The Honest Ulsterman, 3:AM Magazine, Dogmatika and White Noise. He writes for the likes of the Atlantic, frieze magazine, and Magnum, and has given talks at the V&A, the LSE, the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Venice Biennale.

Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Stinging Fly Stories and Female Lines: New Writing by Women from Northern Ireland. She also features in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber and Faber), Winter Papers and on BBC Radio 4.

Book Now

Paul McVeigh

The Good Son & I Hear You

chair

In Conversation w/ Kit de Wall

Chairing Darran Anderson & Wendy Erskine Birmingham Lit Fest

Focus on: Northern Ireland –

Darran Anderson & Wendy Erskine