Literature

Author Lucy Caldwell in Conversation with Anne Flaherty

Autumn Literary Interviews at the ICC

About Lucy Caldwell: Born in Belfast, Lucy Caldwell is the award-winning author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and two collections of short stories: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021).    She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (2019).

Lucy’s work has attracted numerous awards, including the Rooney Prize for Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Imison Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Irish Writers’ and Screenwriters’ Guild Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Award (Canada & Europe), the Edge Hill Short Story prize Readers’ Choice Award, a Fiction Uncovered Award, a K. Blundell Trust Award, a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the BBC National Short Story Award.  Lucy is a former RLF Fellow, a Visiting Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast, and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.

Lucy will discuss her latest novel, These Days, which vividly portrays the under-explored and mostly unknown history of the Belfast Blitz. Against the devastation of the Easter Raids, a series of German airstrikes on the city in April and May 1941, the novel charts the consequences of wartime events on two sisters, Audrey and Emma Bell and their mother Florence. These days was published to critical acclaim earlier this year.

Hilary Mantel described it as ‘adroit, precise storytelling, atmospheric and satisfying: this is a novel of real substance’.

 

Two sisters, four nights, one city.

April, 1941. Belfast has escaped the worst of the war – so far. Over the next two months, it’s going to be destroyed from above, so that people will say, in horror, My God, Belfast is finished.Many won’t make it through, and no one who does will remain unchanged.

Following the lives of sisters Emma and Audrey – one engaged to be married, the other in a secret relationship with another woman – as they try to survive the horrors of the four nights of bombing which were the Belfast Blitz, ‘These Days’ is a timeless and heart-breaking novel about living under duress, about family, and about how we try to stay true to ourselves.

 

About Anne Flaherty: a journalist born in London and growing up in County Clare, Anne has worked for the Irish Press in Dublin and  the Irish Times in Belfast as well as reporting from  Africa and Asia.  She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, and holds an MA in Anglo-Irish Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and an MA in Children’s Literature from the University of Surrey. 

Wed 21 September 2022

Doors 6.30pm, Starts 7.00pm

Tickets: £8

Interested in Literature?

You may also like

Bucket List Books: Reading Ulysses and Proust
Literature

Bucket List Books: Reading Ulysses and Proust

Join our new reading group in English and explore these texts as Joyce and Proust intended: as wonderful and strange. “Silly” and “unpredictable”. And most important, all for us.

Thu 06 February 2025

Read More
An Evening with Joseph O’Connor – Author of The Ghosts of Rome
Literature

An Evening with Joseph O’Connor – Author of The Ghosts of Rome

Join award-winning author Joseph O’Connor as he delves into the gripping story behind his latest novel, exploring wartime intrigue, resistance, and courage in Occupied Rome. Followed by an engaging Q&A and book signing.

Fri 21 February 2025

Read More
WRITE, NOW!  A Free Creative Writing Workshop with Poet and Playwright Damian Gorman
Literature

WRITE, NOW! A Free Creative Writing Workshop with Poet and Playwright Damian Gorman

A short free writing workshop for those who write, have written or want to write, but could do with a little encouragement. DAMIAN GORMAN is a poet and playwright with well over 30 years experience in encouraging writing in others.

Sat 01 March 2025

Read More
A night of readings and music to mark the book launch of Brian Friel’s short story collection “STORIES OF IRELAND”.  This special event will be introduced by Louise Kennedy, author of  the award-winning book “Trespasses”
Literature

A night of readings and music to mark the book launch of Brian Friel’s short story collection “STORIES OF IRELAND”. This special event will be introduced by Louise Kennedy, author of the award-winning book “Trespasses”

‘Some of the best stories ever written. They are everything short stories should be – deft, skilfully written, funny and quite often breathlessly sad’ Edna O’Brien

Thu 13 March 2025

Read More