Author Lucy Caldwell in Conversation with Anne Flaherty

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.