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The Search for Identity, Love and Belonging: Being young in Cork and Amsterdam
Tobi Lakmaker’s account of coming of age in Amsterdam is a frank and funny journey through the highs and lows of one’s 20s, and a story of making peace with one’s identity and sexuality. Lisa McInerney’s novel is a riotous blend of sex, scandal, love, feminism, gender, music, and transgression against the background of today’s changing Ireland.
On Sri Lanka, Fragile Coral Reefs and Changing Societies
Reef is set in the disintegrating paradise of Sri Lanka. Told by Triton, who has been working as a house servant to Mister Salgado, a marine biologist obsessed by sea movements and the disappearing coral reef, this novel spans political upheavals in Sri Lanka and exile in London. Beautifully told – at once luminous and epic – Reef was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and remains a timeless, urgent classic.
Writing the Climate Crisis: Eco activists and tech billionaires
Birnam Wood pitches the interests of a group of eco activists against those of an American billionaire, who plans to extract rare minerals. Collective ideals and ideologies are tested in this gripping, thought-provoking, tightly plotted novel. Full of moral complexity, Birnam Wood captures our collective despair about the state of the planet.
Storytelling from Novels and TV Scripts to Video Games
The Future, the latest novel from the Women’s Prizewinning, bestselling author of The Power, is a thrilling exploration of the world we have made and where it is that we are heading. A dystopian tale of digital technology and community, The Future follows a group of tech billionaires facing the end of the world. Naomi Alderman will talk about her novel as well as about her creative career as a games designer and a lead writer on the reality game Perplex City and as co-creator of the game Zombies, Run!
Powerful Eco-thrillers: Interrogating power and the end of the world
The Future and Birnam Wood are both compulsively readable novels of big ideas. Both tell of tech billionaires and eco activists alike, both look at technology, surveillance, power, capitalism and human community. In this rare conversation between these two fantastic writers, they will tackle these essential questions of our times and discuss how their novels’ themes resonate with each other.
Mothers, Daughters, Fathers and Sons : Writing family relationships
Families provide endless inspiration for literature – this event will look at unconditional love, inheritance and influence in particular. Unsettling, bleak and funny, Riley’s My Phantoms explores a dysfunctional family unit. A failing relationship between mother and daughter is examined with uncompromising brilliance and sharpness. Gwendoline Riley will be in conversation with Charlie Gilmour, who, in his moving memoir, focuses on his complex relationship with his biological father.
Living Alongside Nature: From isolated islands to a bond with magpie
This festival conversation will explore the role of nature in writing. Elizabeth O’Connor describes life on a remote Welsh island in a world on the edge of crisis in 1938, while Charlie Gilmour writes beautifully and emotionally about saving and taming a magpie. These two powerful literary debuts will alter how we look at nature.