interview

In Conversation w/ Kit de Wall

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Kit de Waal in Conversation with Paul McVeigh

 The Market Place Theatre and Arts Centre

Monday 22 July | 1.30pm | £10

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 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/

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Interviewing Marlon James at ILFD

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Ten Years of Seven Killings

Marlon James

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.

Date : 

Sat 25 May

Time : 

19:00

Venue : 

Merrion Square Park – Speranza

Price : 

€20 / €18

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In Conversation with Billy O’Callaghan

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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/

Chairing Wendy Erskine & Bernie McGill at JHISS ’22

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Celebrating the Short Story with Wendy Erskine & Bernie McGill

in conversation with …Paul McVeigh

Wednesday 27th July at 1.30pm Market Theatre, Armagh.

Wendy Erskine’s first collection, Sweet Home, (2018) was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, and won the 2020 Butler Literary Award. In her new collection, Dance Move, we meet characters who are looking to wrest control of their lives, only to find themselves defined by moments in their past. In these stories – as in real life – the funny, the tender and the devastating go hand in hand.

“Truly magnificent. These stories buzz with life and verve and humour. A collection that reminds us how glorious the short story can be.” Danielle McLaughlin

Bernie McGill

Bernie McGill has written two novels, The Butterfly Cabinet and The Watch House, which was shortlisted for the 2019 Irish/European Union Prize for Literature, a collection of short stories, Sleepwalkers, and two plays, The Weather Watchers, and The Haunting of Helena Blunden. Her short fiction has been shortlisted for numerous awards and is anthologised widely. Her latest collection of short stories is This Train is For, published by
No Alibis, June 2022.

“[Bernie] McGill writes about life, love and telegraphy with a poet’s clarity.” The Sunday Times

For the full festival programme go here.

You can still listen to my short story ‘Dady Christmas’ on BBC Radio 4 here.

The Good Son 3rd Editon
You can buy here

Winner of The Polari First Novel Prize

‘A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.’ Donal Ryan

‘Raw, funny and endlessly entertaining’. Jonathan Coe

Interviewing Damon Galgut current Booker Prize-winner

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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.**”

Jamie Attenberg, Cate Kennedy, Rosie Schaap and me!

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The Writing Life: Friendship, Travel & Creativity Across Continents

The Crescent is delighted to welcome two best-selling international authors to Belfast: Jami Attenberg (New Orleans-based author of seven books of fiction and most recently a memoir),  and Cate Kennedy (Australian-based author of two short story collections, a novel, three poetry collections and a memoir). Cate and Jami will be in conversation with Northern Ireland-based writers Roise Schaap and Paul McVeigh, to share their work and discuss travel, writing experience and friendship.

Jami Attenberg is the New York Times best-selling author of seven books of fiction, including The Middlesteins and All This Could Be Yours. She has contributed essays to the New York Times Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, the Sunday Times, and The Guardian, among other publications. She lives in New Orleans.

Cate Kennedy is the author of two short story collections, a novel, three poetry collections and a memoir.  Her awards include the Victorian Premier’s Literary Prize for Poetry for her collection The Taste of River Water (Scribe, 2011) and the NSW People’s Choice Award for her novel The World Beneath (Scribe 2009, published Australia, the U.S.A, the U.K, France and Hong Kong). Her short story collections are both on the Australian school syllabus as study texts.  She teaches widely both in Australia and the U.S., and has just completed her PhD in Creative Writing.

Rosie Schaap is the author of Drinking with Men: A Memoir and Becoming a Sommelier. From 2011 to 2017 she was a columnist for The New York Times Magazine. Her essays appear in numerous anthologies, most recently the new edition of Goodbye to All That: Writers on Loving and Leaving New York.  She teaches creative nonfiction at Fairleigh Dickinson University and the Irish Writers Centre and her next book, The Slow Road North: How I Found Peace in an Improbable Country, will be out next year. A native New Yorker, she has lived in the Glens of Antrim since 2019.

Paul McVeigh is a writer, author and performer. His novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Novel Award and the McCrea Literary Award. He is the Editor of three anthologies, including, 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices, (Unbound), published in 2021. paulmcveighwriter.com

Date Monday 09 May 2022

Time 7:30 PM – 9:00 PM

Price£4

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Interviewing Armistead Maupin

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Armistead Maupin is heading back out on the road and stopping off in Belfast’s Ulster Hall on 8 June 2022. And I get to interview him. Can’t tell you how much this means to me – I feel like I grew up with his characters.

‘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.

Don’t miss the chance to join America’s ultimate storyteller, as he recounts his favourite tales from the past four decades, offering his own engaging observations on society and the world we inhabit.’

Tickets