Programme

Authors Bernie McGill and Anne Devlin will discuss their stories in The Long Gaze Back. Chaired by author Jan Carson.

Anne Devlin was born in Belfast. David Marcus first published her stories in the Irish Press in the 1980’s. Her collection The Waypaver was published by Faber in 1986. She is best known as a dramatist, both for Ourselves Alone (Royal Court, 1985) and After Easter (Royal Shakespeare Company, 1993). She has worked extensively in TV and film. Her most recent work was the radio play The Forgotten(2009). 

Bernie McGill is the author of Sleepwalkers, a collection of stories short-listed in 2014 for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and of The Butterfly Cabinet (named in 2012 by Downton creator Julian Fellowes as his novel of the year). Her new novel, The Watch House, was published in 2017. Her work has been placed in the Seán Ó Faoláin, the Bridport, and the Michael McLaverty Short Story Prizes and she won the Zoetrope:All-Story Award in the US in 2008. Her short fiction has appeared in The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore and Female Lines, all by New Island Books. She is the recipient of a number of Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards and was granted a research bursary in 2013 from the Society of Authors. She lives in Portstewart in Northern Ireland with her family.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts officer based in Belfast. Her first novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears was published by Liberties Press in 2014, followed by a short story collection, Children’s Children in 2016. A flash fiction pamphlet, Postcard Stories, is forthcoming from the Emma Press in 2017.Her stories have appeared in journals such as Storm Cellar, Banshee and The Honest Ulsterman. In 2014 she received an Arts Council NI Artist’s Career Enhancement Bursary. She was longlisted for the Sean O’Faolain short story prize in 2015 and won the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2016. 

Join authors Nuala O’Connor and Lia Mills for an evening of discussion and readings.

Nuala O’Connor‘s fifth short story collection Joyride to Jupiter was published by New Island in June 2017. Her third novel, Miss Emily, about the poet Emily Dickinson and her Irish maid was shortlisted for the Bord Gáis Energy Eason Book Club Novel of the Year 2015 and longlisted for the 2017 International Dublin Literary Award. Nuala’s fourth novel, Becoming Belle, will be published in 2018.

Lia Mills writes novels, short stories, essays and an occasional blog.  A memoir, In Your Face, describes her experience of mouth cancer treatment in 2006. Her third novel, Fallen, was the Dublin/Belfast Two Cities One Book selection in 2016, in which year she was also the Arts Council Writer Fellow in UCD and writer-in-residence at Farmleigh House.