Speakers
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.
