Wicklow’s
leading festival
for writers & readers
Blessington Library
Saturday 19th November 2022
Wicklow Arts Office on Twitter
Full details below↓
Toddler Time with Sarah Sparkles
10.00 - 11.00am
Sarah Sparkles and her puppet friends return to delight audiences with a fully interactive show for the little ones. Featuring lots of fun stories, music and singing, movement and dancing are encouraged….oh and of course...there’ll be bubbles too!
Suitable for 0-4 and their adults.
TheDead Zoo Workshop with Peter Donnelly
11.30am - 12.30pm
Join award winning children’s author and illustrator Peter Donnelly for the wonderful ‘Dead Zoo Workshop’. Peter will read from his bestselling book ‘TheDead Zoo’ followed by an illustration workshop where everyone will learn to draw some of the animals from The National History Museum.
Suitable for 6+ and their adults.
First Steps, Giant Steps workshop writing workshop with Declan Burke
1.00 - 3.30pm
Every journey begins with a single step, but that single step can be a giant step too, and not least because the most daunting aspect of a novel for new writers is how to get start. In “First Steps, Giant Steps”, Declan Burke will addressthe issues of how to generate and develop the most important elements of storytelling - plot and characters - but also deal with the practical and psychological aspects of how to start a novel, both of which are equally as important as any element of craft.
Getting to grips with character, structure and pace writing workshop with Louise Phillips
4.00 - 6.00pm
During this 2 hour workshop, bestselling crime author, Louise Phillips, will help you get to grips with character creation, structure, including plotting, planning and pace.
In conversation with Claire Keegan
6.30 - 8.30pm
Join award winning writer Claire Keegan for a reading from her novel Small Things Like These followed by conversation moderated by local writer Philip St John.
Find out more about Claire Keegan...
Sarah Tully
From an early age, Sarah Tully enjoyed reading, writing and telling her own stories to anyone who would listen, including her dolls! With a background in Speech and Drama and a Bachelor’s degree in English and Irish, Sarah is now a professional storyteller and performer. Over the years, she has created interactive Toddler Time shows with music, guitar and puppets. For older children, improvised storytelling with music and magic intertwined.
She performs regularly in libraries and schools. She has also performed on stage at the Civic Theatre, at festivals and events, such as Rathdrum Summer Songs, Fairytale Festival, Bookville, Wainfest, Fingal Festival of Children’s Literature, spreading the joy of creativity, music and the arts to children all over Ireland.
In 2019, she won Top Outstanding Young Person Award for Cultural Awareness from the Junior Chamber of Commerce. She also enjoys comedy improv and is a professional Voice actor.
Peter Donnelly
Peter Donnelly is a bestselling author and illustrator of children’s picture books. They include The President’s Glasses, The President’s Cat, The President’s Surprise, The Dead Zoo and Up on the Mountain. Peter’s books have all been shortlisted in the Irish book awards. The President’s Cat won him the An Post Children’s Book of the Year in 2018. His new picture book ‘Little Wolf’ will be published in September 2023.
Declan Burke
DeclanBurke is the author of Eightball Boogie (2003), The Big O (2007), Absolute Zero Cool (2011), Slaughter’s Hound (2012), Crime Always Pays (2014), The Lost and the Blind (2014), and The Lammisters (2019). Absolute Zero Cool was shortlisted in the crime fiction section for the Irish Book Awards, and received theGoldsboro Award for Best Humorous Crime Novel in 2012. Eightball Boogie and Slaughter’s Hound were also shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards. Declan is also the editor of Down These Green Streets: Irish Crime Writing in the 21st Century (2011) and Trouble is Our Business (2016), and the co-editor, with John Connolly, of Books to Die For (2013), which won the Anthony Award for Best Non-Fiction Crime. Declan was a UNESCO / Dublin City Council writer-in-residence for 2017-18
Louise Phillips
Dublin-born bestselling crime author Louise Phillips won the Best Irish Crime Fiction Novel of the Year in the Irish Book Awards for The Doll’s House, her second novel. Each of her other bestselling novels, Red Ribbons, Last Kiss, The Game Changer and The Hiding Game were shortlisted for Best Irish Crime Novel in the prestigious Irish Book Awards. Along with other literary awards, in 2016, she was longlisted for the CWA Dagger in the Library Award in the U.K., and her first two novels were published in the U.S. Her fifth novel The Hiding Game is currently under option and in development with a major U.S. film company. They All Lied, her sixth novel, was published to critical acclaim in March 2022, and she has recently been awarded an Arts Council Bursary for Literature from the Arts Council of Ireland. She is currently working on her seventh novel.
Claire Keegan
Raised on a farm in Wicklow, Claire Keegan’s works are translated into thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and was a Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster won the Davy Byrnes Award — then the world’s richest prize for a story — and was recently named by The Times UK as one of the top 50 works of fiction to be published in the 21st Century. Her stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and Best American Stories. Her novel, Small Things Like These, won the Prix Littéraire des Ambassadeurs en Irlande for the best Irish novel published in France. It was then shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, awarded to the best new work of literature published anywhere in the world in the English language, regardless of form. It has also been shortlisted for the Dalkey Prize Novel of the Year. It has won the Kerry Prize for Irish Novel of the Year and the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It is now shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Gold Crown for fiction.
Claire Keegan is also renowned as a lecturer and has held several fellowships, most recently lecturing at Trinity College, Dublin and at Cambridge University. She is to be awarded Woman of the Year for Literature, 2022.
Philip St John
Philip St John has written four plays. The Sylvia was staged in Smock Alley (2013) and toured Italy in translation (2017-19). Temptress ran at Mermaid Arts Centre and The New Theatre in 2015 and was re-staged in 2019. An American production company has bought the film rights.
Philip’s short stories have been published in New Irish Writing and various anthologies. He is currently working on a number of Arts Council funded theatre and fiction projects.
New Town Centre
Blessington
Co. Wicklow
Phone: (045) 891 740
