Emerging Voices

Exploring themes from first love, grief and trauma to family bonds and deep friendships, join us for an evening around three captivating debut novels. In Ruth McKee’s Wild Iris (Dedalus Books) the past haunts the present in this witty, unflinching portrait of a woman at a devastating crossroads. Edie May Hand‘s Dirtpickers (Manilla Press) is a heart-swelling story of love, trauma, and found family that emerges after tragedy. Juliano Zaffino’s The Steps (Tramp Press) blends psychological suspense with intimate family drama in this story of rebuilding life after tragedy. The authors join author Patrick Holloway in conversation.

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

Ruth McKee is a novelist and short fiction writer, twice-shortlisted for the Hennessy Literary Awards and a winner of the Irish Writers Centre Novel Fair. Wild Iris (Dedalus) is her debut novel, described by John Banville as ‘wonderfully inventive…funny, moving and vastly entertaining.’ She’s the editor of Books Ireland, The Irish Writers Handbook and the host of the Burning Books podcast.

Edie May Hand is a writer from County Meath, Ireland. She graduated from University College Dublin in 2019 with a joint honours in History of Art and English Literature. She has been writing for over a decade. Edie began Dirtpickers as part of Maynooth University’s Creative Writing Masters Programme, for which she received a first-class honours degree in 2024. Dirtpickers is her debut novel and she is currently working on her second.

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Juliano Zaffino is a writer, researcher and editor based near London. He founded YourShelf, a bespoke book-subscription service, in 2016. Over time, YourShelf expanded to encompass the YourShelf Podcast, where he interviewed a variety of writers from Lauren Groff to Doireann Ni Ghriofa, as well as the YourShelf Press, which published the author’s own poetry collection All Those Bodies And They’re Moving (2020), and Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s SELF ESTEEM (2021). The author also introduced Florence Welch to the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1616, which inspired her 2022 album Dance Fever. Zaffino holds a PhD on ‘Cutting Shakespeare’, from the Shakespeare Institute and the Royal Shakespeare Company. The Steps is his first novel.

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