lit fest

Free Event at West Cork Festival

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The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices

Date 

Thursday 29 July 2021 Time 

7:00 pm Location: Online 

Zoom Admission 

Free Book Now -The 32 is a celebration of working-class voices from the island of Ireland and it features 16 published writers and 16 new voices writing about their experience of being working class in Ireland. In this event editor Paul McVeigh speaks to four of the contributors Riley Johnston, Dave Lordan, Abby Oliveira and Rick O’Shea.

We read because we want to experience lives and emotions beyond our own, to learn, to see with others’ eyes.

Edited by award-winning novelist Paul McVeigh, this intimate and illuminating collection features memoir and essays from established and emerging Irish voices including Kevin Barry, Dermot Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Lisa McInerney, Lyra McKee and many more. The 32 is published by Unbound on 8 July 2021.

Too often, working-class writers find that the hurdles they come up against are higher and harder to leap over than those faced by writers from more affluent backgrounds. As in Common People – an anthology of working-class writers in the UK edited by Kit de Waal and the inspiration behind this collection – The 32 sees writers who have made that leap reach back to give a helping hand to those coming up behind. Without these working-class voices, without the vital reflection of real lives or role models for working-class readers and writers, literature will be poorer. We will all be poorer.

The 32 Anthology goes to UCD Festival

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The @FestivalUCD has over 100 *free* online events across science, arts, performance, wellbeing and more.

The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices

Sat 29 May at 5:00 pm – Sat 29 May at 6:00 pm 

REGISTER

Paul McVeigh is the editor of The 32 – an upcoming collection of essays and memoir, bringing together sixteen well-known writers from working class backgrounds with an equal number of new and emerging writers from all over the island of Ireland. He’ll be in conversation with two of the featured authors Lisa McInerney and Michael Nolan.

Pre-Order here in UK

Free Event: In Conversation Australian Writers Cate Kennedy and Paddy O’Reilly

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Australian Writers Cate Kennedy and Paddy O’Reilly in Conversation with Paul McVeigh

About this Event

Cate Kennedy is a novelist, short story writer and poet whose work features in the school syllabus in Australia. When writing about her favourite Australian fiction, the late Eileen Battersby recommended Cate Kennedy’s second short story collection Like a House on Fire (2012) and said: ‘Australia’s response to the art of Alice Munro, Cate Kennedy is a singular artist who looks to the ordinary in a small rural community and is particularly astute on exploring the fallout left by the aftermath of the personal disasters that change everything. Her debut collection, Dark Roots (2006) heralded the arrival of a fully-formed master of the form ….’ The Irish Times 

Paddy O’Reilly is a multiple award-winning Australian writer whose novels and stories have won and been shortlisted for many major awards, and have been published, anthologised and broadcast in Australia, China, Europe, the UK and the USA. 

‘In her latest collection, Peripheral Vision, Paddy O’Reilly proves to be one of Australia’s most accomplished authors of the long-wave story. Peripheral Vision has expansive energy, and will fascinate readers with a taste for open endings and vivid voices.’ The Australian

In conversation with me! I hope you can come along. Book free here.


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

Interviewing Bryan Washington

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 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

Cork Short Story Festival 2020: Niamh Campbell & Kit de Waal

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Niamh Campbell & Kit de Waal in conversation with Paul McVeigh

campbell

Saturday
October 10th

7pm (€5)

Niamh Campbell was born in 1988 and grew up in Dublin. Her short fiction and essays have appeared in The Dublin Review, 3:AM, Banshee, gorse, Five Dials, and Tangerine. She was awarded a Next Generation literary bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland, and annual literary bursaries in 2018 and 2019. She holds a PhD in English from King’s College London and is a current postdoctoral fellow for the Arts Council of Ireland at Maynooth University. Her debut novel This Happy was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson in 2020. She was the winner of the 2020 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award. She lives and works in Dublin.

campbell

Kit de Wall was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother, who was a childminder and foster carer and a Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels. She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children, and has written training manuals on adoption, foster care and judgecraft for members of the judiciary. Her writing has received numerous awards including the Bridport Flash Fiction Prize 2014 and 2015 and the SI Leeds Literary Reader’s Choice Prize 2014 and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. MY NAME IS LEON, her first novel was published in 2016 and shortlisted for the Costa Book Award. She has two children and lives in the West Midlands.

Paul McVeigh has written comedy, essays, flash fiction, a novel, plays and short stories, and his work has been performed on radio, stage and television, and published in seven languages. The Good Son is his first novel.

The 32: Cork Short Story Festival 2020

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Irish Working Class Voices: Martin Doyle, Eoin MacNamee, Rosaleen McDonagh & Lynn Ruane in conversation with Paul McVeigh

Irish Working Class Voices

Thursday October 8th 7pm

We have our first live event for the anthology although it’s not out until next year. You can pre-order here.

Here’s the blurb from Cork!

Martin Doyle edits the books section of The Irish Times in print and online. He joined the paper in 2007, having previously been on the staff of The Times for five years and serving as Editor of The Irish Post in London.

Eoin McNamee has written two novellas, The Last of Deeds, which was shortlisted for the 1989 Irish Times/Aer Lingus Award for Irish Literature, and Love in History. His novels include Resurrection Man, later made into a film, The Blue Tango, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize, and Orchid Blue.

Rosaleen McDonagh is a writer, activist and performer. She is a frequent contributor to Sunday Miscellany, RTE Radio 1 and is a columnist for The Irish Times. She is a member of Aosdána and worked on gender based violence for over ten years with Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre.

Lynn Ruane is a social activist and politician who has served as a member of Seanad Éireann since April 2016. Before entering politics, she developed community drug services and community initiatives over 15 years in Tallaght and Dublin’s Canal Communities.. Her first book, People Like Me, won non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards.

Paul McVeigh has written comedy, essays, flash fiction, a novel, plays and short stories, and his work has been performed on radio, stage and television, and published in seven languages. The Good Son is his first novel.