In partnership with Dublin City Libraries.

This event takes place in The Great Hall in the North Range at IMMA Venues.

Join us for a lively and engaging afternoon of book chat with some of Ireland’s most exciting contemporary authors. Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Our London Lives (Atlantic) is a deeply moving novel of love and loneliness in an ever-changing city. David Park’s Ghost Wedding (Oneworld) is a masterful portrait of love, betrayal, and how the past haunts our present. The authors join arts journalist Paula Shields in conversation. Joseph O’Connor joins journalist and broadcaster Flor MacCarthy to explore his thrilling new novel The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker). Miriam O’Callaghan joins author and podcaster Róisín Ingle to discuss her absorbing new memoir Miriam: Life, Work, Everything (Sandycove).

Please note we may be capturing candid imagery at this event for use on our social media and website.

Christine Dwyer Hickey was born in Dublin and is a novelist and short story writer. Her 2019 novel The Narrow Land won two major prizes: the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award. 2020 saw her 2004 novel Tatty chosen for UNESCO’s Dublin One City One Book promotion. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages. She is an elected member of Aosdana, the Irish academy of arts.

David Park is the author of eleven novels, a novella and two collections of short stories. The Healing won the Authors’ Club First Novel Award. The Truth Commissioner was awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize and his novel Travelling in a Strange Land won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. The Light of Amsterdam was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. He received the American Ireland Fund Literary Award and has been shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year four times. His work has featured on BBC Radio 4, both as short stories and twice as the Book at Bedtime and is published widely in translation. He has received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and an Honorary Fellowship in the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University, Belfast. His most recent novel is Ghost Wedding.

Miriam O’Callaghan has been a leading figure in Irish broadcast and current affairs for over 40 years. She has presented RTÉ’s Prime Time since 1996 and hosts the live radio show,Sunday with Miriam.

Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea, Ghost Light, Shadowplay and My Father’s House, a Washington Post Book of the Year. His work has been shortlisted for the LA Times Book Award, twice for the Whitbread/Costa and twice for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and has won the Nielsen Bookscan Golden Book Award, France’s Prix Millepages, Italy’s Premio Acerbi and Premio Napoli, an American Library Association Award, the American Ireland Fund Literary Award, the Hennessy Writer of the Year and Hall of Fame Awards, the Eason/An Post Novel of the Year Award, a Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library, the Irish Pen Award for Outstanding Achievement and the Prix Madeline Zepter for European Novel of the Year. He is Frank McCourt Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

Flor MacCarthy is a journalist, broadcaster, and author of the bestselling book The Presidents’ Letters which was shortlisted for Best Irish-Published Book 2021. A former news reporter and anchor with RTÉ, she’s presented a wide range of radio and tv programmes from current affairs to the arts to history. Her work has also been featured on Newstalk, the BBC, Radio France, and in the national and regional press. She has hosted numerous interviews with writers and public figures, including Joseph O’Connor, Lara Marlowe, David Puttnam, Richard Kearney, and Samantha Barry.

Róisín Ingle is a columnist, features writer and podcaster with The Irish Times. She is the author of two collections of her columns, Pieces of Me and Public Displays of Emotion and is the co-author of The Daughterhood with Natasha Fennell which has been published in several languages. She produces and co-presents the award winning ‘Women’s Podcast’ on irishtimes.com.

Paula Shields is an arts journalist, working on Arena, RTE’s flagship arts show on Radio 1. Other highlights include making the IFTA award-winning TV documentary, Fairytale of New York, in 2017, judging the 2017 and 2018 Irish Times Theatre Awards, and contributing an essay to the latest Sunday Miscellany Anthology in 2023.

To hear first about our future events sign up to our newsletter here.