Emerging Voices

This event takes place in the Bartley's Lounge, Grafton Hotel.

Exploring themes from hope and love to resilience and ambition, join us for an evening around four captivating debut novels from some of the freshest voices in Irish fiction. Gethan Dick’s Water in the Desert, Fire in the Night (Tramp Press) is a unique take on what we do when the world ends. Aisling Rawle’s The Compound (HarperCollins) is a dark and gripping story of survival. Garrett Carr’s The Boy from the Sea (Picador) is a moving story of family and community. Seán Farrell’s Frogs for Watchdogs (New Island) is a tender and imaginative exploration of the intensity of childhood. The authors join author Aingeala Flannery in conversation.

This is an 18+ event.

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

Gethan Dick was born in 1980 in Belfast and grew up in the West of Ireland. She moved to London for an MA in Creative and Life Writing at Goldsmiths College. She then studied at Camberwell College of Art and shifted her creative practice towards text-based and co-created visual art. She moved to Marseille, France, where she has lived since 2011, working as one half of visual-arts duo gethan&myles with her partner, Myles Quin.

Aisling Rawle is an ex-bookseller from Leitrim in the West of Ireland, where she wrote The Compound, her dark reality TV satire and debut novel. Aisling currently lives in Dublin, where she has also worked as a secondary-school English teacher.

Garrett Carr teaches Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and he is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and The Irish Times. His non-fiction The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. The Boy from the Sea is his debut novel.

Seán Farrell was born and brought up in Ireland. After graduating from Cambridge University, he spent fifteen years in France. As well as writing, he also works as a freelance editor. He lives in Sligo with his wife, the writer Elske Rahill, and their four children. Frogs for Watchdogs is his first novel.

Aingeala Flannery is the author of The Amusements (Penguin), which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2023 and the John McGahern Prize. Her short stories and personal essays have appeared in The Irish Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Paper Visual Art, and The Winter Papers, and have been broadcast on RTÉ Radio One. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin and has taught on programmes at the University of Galway, Dublin City University and The Irish Writers Centre. Aingeala is deputy publisher of The Dublin Review.

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