The Book of Everlasting Things
Aanchal Malhotra in conversation with Paul McVeigh
Armagh Robinson Library, Armagh
May-27-2026 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Register here
In Conversation with Aanchal Malhotra
lit fest
Interviewing Roddy Doyle at Cork World Book Festival
I’ll be interviewing Booker Prize-winner Roddy Doyle at Cork World Book Festival.
Roddy Doyle with Paul McVeigh
He was last in town for a chat with Roy Keane at the Marquee and we felt it was time to have Ireland’s favourite Dubliner, Roddy Doyle, down to Cork World Book Fest for a conversation with CWBF regular, Paul McVeigh.
Roddy Doyle’s bookshelves and DVD racks are buckling under the weight of his prolific and energetic output that has helped shape how we see ourselves on this small, complex island. Always astute, always brim full of empathy, and always writing to his own rhythm, Roddy Doyle needs no introduction, and this year the Cork World Book Fest is honoured to host one of Ireland’s most cherished authors, teachers, mentors, activists and observers. So sit back and enjoy what promises to be a fantastic afternoon of great joy and humanity.
Get tickets for both Quite Simply, How Do We Live? and Roddy Doyle in Conversation and get 20% off!
Saturday 25 April 2026
Triskel | 2pm | €15
Book: https://triskelarts.ticketsolve.com/shows/873662502/events
Words, In Other Places, An Irish Writers Centre Literary Festival
I’m teaching a class at this cross-border festival.
The Anatomy of a Page. During the session you’ll dissect a page of text and look at the ways the author draws the reader and ensures you want to read more. You’ll look at each line under a microscope to see how each reveals character or furthers the story, You’ll leave with more understanding of the fundaments of writing and more tools in your writers toolkit.
Paul McVeigh’s debut novel, The Good Son, won The Polari First Book Prize, and was shortlisted for many others including The Prix du Roman Cezam. His play, Big Man, premiered at The Lyric Theatre and won an Irish Times Theatre Award in 2023. His short stories have been in anthologies, journals and newspapers, and read on BBC Radio 3, 4 and 5, RTE Radio, as well as, Sky ARTS. His debut collection of short stories, I Hear You, all commissioned by BBC Radio 4, was published in March 2025 and won The McCrea Literary Award. Paul has edited four anthologies and his writing has been translated into eight languages.
Paul was acting Head of Literature for Arts Council of Northern Ireland and has judged many literature prizes including the Royal Society of Literature’s VS Pritchard Award, the International Dylan Thomas Prize and Kerry Group.
Appearance at Folkstone Book Festival
Short Stories: Adam Marek & Paul McVeigh
Sun 23 Nov 2025, 12th – Tickets here.
Two award-winning masters of the short story come together for an unmissable hour of fiction, feeling, and fierce imagination. Belfast-born Paul McVeigh – author of The Good Son and I Hear You and co-founder of the London Short Story Festival – writes with humour, compassion and razor-sharp insight. His work, celebrated internationally, explores working-class life, queer identity and the power of language to wound or redeem.
Folkestone-based Adam Marek – winner of the prestigious Arts Foundation Short Story Fellowship and author of The Universe Delivers the Enemy You Need – is known for his brilliantly strange, deeply human stories that bend reality and tap into the surreal edge of everyday life.
Together, McVeigh and Marek will read from their work, talk about their playfully different approaches to the form, and explore how short stories can capture the biggest questions in the smallest moments. Expect a rich conversation about craft, vulnerability, play, and why the short story continues to punch above its weight.
A must-attend for readers, writers, and anyone who believes in the power of a well-told tale to shake the world – or shift your soul.
You can also buy my radio short story collection, I Hear You, out now.
Chairing Darran Anderson & Wendy Erskine Birmingham Lit Fest
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.
Chairing Julia Armfield & Paul Mendez at Birmingham Lit Fest
Julia Armfield & Paul Mendez
8th October, Birmingham Rep, 2-3pm
Two of the UK’s most exciting voices in queer writing, Julia Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea) and Paul Mendez (Rainbow Milk) talk to our Guest Curator Paul McVeigh about their novels, their writing and the LGBTQ+ writing scene, which is finally seeing the celebration it deserves.
Julia Armfield is a fiction writer and occasional playwright. She was shortlisted for the 2019 Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. She was commended in the Moth Short Story Prize 2017, longlisted for the Deborah Rogers Award 2018, and won the White Review short story prize 2018.Her critically acclaimed short story collection, salt slow, was published in2019. Our Wives Under the Sea is her first novel.
Paul Mendez is a British writer, based in Birmingham. His debut novel Rainbow Milk (Dialogue, 2020), an Observer Best Debuts choice, was shortlisted for the Polari First Novel Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Jhalak Prize, the Lambda Literary Award in Gay Fiction and a British Book Award (Fiction Debut). He has written for Vogue, AnOther, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, The Face, the London Review of Books, the TLS,the WritersMosaic and the BBC. He is currently adapting Rainbow Milk for television, and is a student on the MA programme in Black British Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Tickets here.
Birmingham Literature Festival with Kit de Waal & Osman Yousefzada
Birmingham, the city that raised me: Kit de Waal & Osman Yousefzada
****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.
Appearing at Primadonna Festival with Joanne Harris & Kit de Waal
I’ll be chairing an event with Joanne Harris author of 20 novels & journalist, editor and interviewer Sarah Shaffi. Pretentious? Moi?! ‘In this light-hearted session, we look at the heavy-handed writers who allow their imaginations to be overruled by their egos, and think about how to avoid the pitfalls of authorial pretension.’
The second event also sounds like a lot of fun.
Dear Kit and Paul… ‘Need help? Why not join our literary agony Aunt and Uncle, Kit de Waal and Paul McVeigh as they offer advice and solutions to all of your writerly (and other) problems.’
You can buy your festival tickets here.
This year’s lineup includes Jordan Stephens of hip hop duo Rizzle Kicks; bestselling author and screenwriter Juno Dawson; podcaster Viv Groskop; screenwriter and author Abi Morgan (The Iron Lady, Suffragette, The Split); social media influencers Alex Light and Natalie Lee aka StyleMeSunday; superstar musician La Roux; multiple-award winning writer and Primadonna Kit de Waal; TV presenter and writer June Sarpong; Sunday Times bestselling-author Cathy Rentzenbrink; top crime writer Erin Kelly… and many more famous names and emerging talent from the world of books, entertainment and music. Plus walkabout Alice in Wonderland, late-night disco sessions, pop-up dance classes, nature walks, stand-up and loads of things for kids to do. And if you’re a writer (or want to be) Primadonna offers you the chance to rub shoulders with agents, authors and publishers or take our ‘MA’. And loads more still to announce!
Donal Ryan Chairing My Event at Listowel Writer’s Week
The wonderful Irish writer Donal Ryan will now chair ‘A Working Class Writer is Something to Be’ at Listowel Writer’s Week.
Unfortunately, Kit de Waal is unable to travel so she will be participating by Zoom.
Tickets are available here.
Understanding the Industry: PROPHETS, MAKERS AND RISK TAKERS
‘Prophets, Makers and Risk Takers: A Showcase of Writing from Northern Ireland’ is a 2-day festival that brings leading writers in Northern Ireland together, in person and online, to share their ideas and skills with emerging writers, and to promote the best of Northern Irish writing across the world.
I’ll be taking part in the Panel Discussion: Understanding the Industry at 12noon March 9th.
Check out the full programme here.
Winner of The Polari First Novel Prize
‘A triumph of storytelling. An absolute gem.’ Donal Ryan
‘Raw, funny and endlessly entertaining’. Jonathan Coe
Paul McVeigh 