Meet the Bàrd: author Jan Carson

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast.

Her debut novel Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, were published by Liberties Press, Dublin. A micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories was published by the Emma Press in 2017. Jan’s novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019 and subsequently won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019 and the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction. The Raptures was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year, the Dalkey Book Prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Prize in 2022. Jan has been shortlisted for the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize, the BBC National Short Story Prize and An Post Irish Short Story of the Year Award,” and in 2016 won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. Her work has been translated into more than 15 languages.

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Few and Far Between

It’s summer 2017 and the last few residents of the Lough Neagh Archipelago are facing imminent eviction. The flood planned to combat a devastating algae outbreak will submerge their homes, forcing them back to the Mainland for the first time in fifty years.

Robert-John and Marion Connolly came to the islands as children in the 1970s, following their mercurial father, an anthropologist studying the unique society that had developed there. For many, the Neagh Archipelago represented a utopia, a chance to be free of the prejudices and history of Troubles era Northern Ireland. But perhaps this utopia wasn’t all that it seemed.

Marion and Robert-John have grown accustomed to their haunted existence on the Ark, monitoring the mysterious Far Side, where ghostly figures linger and the land swallows secrets whole. How will they cope with a new life on the Mainland? Is it possible to leave the past behind? And will the Ark ever let them go...

Caoilinn Hughes’s latest novel is The Alternatives, a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her second novel, The Wild Laughter won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and her debut Orchid & the Wasp won the Collyer Bristow Prize. Her short stories have won many prizes and she was a finalist for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2025. She was recently Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library.

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