Sean O’Reilly was born in Derry in 1969. He has published a collection of short stories, Curfew and Other Stories (London, Faber & Faber, 2000). His novels are Love And Sleep (Faber & Faber, 2002); The Swing of Things (Faber & Faber, 2004); and Watermark (Dublin, The Stinging Fly Press, 2005).
Emer Martin is a Dubliner and has lived in Paris, London, the Middle East, and various places in the U.S. Her first novel Breakfast in Babylon won Book of the Year 1996 in her native Ireland at the prestigious Listowel Writers’ Week. Houghton Mifflin released Breakfast in Babylon in the U.S. in 1997. She...
Peter Murphy is a writer, spoken word performer, musician and journalist. His first novel John the Revelator was published in the UK and Ireland by Faber & Faber and in the US by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in 2009, was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Fiction Prize in May 09, and longlisted for The Guardian’s...
Timothy O’Grady is the author of the prize-winning novel Motherland and co-author with Kenneth Griffith of Curious Journey: An Oral History of Irelands’s Unfinished Revolution. His most recent work, I Could Read the Sky is a collaboration, in the shape of a lyrical novel, between writer Timothy O’Grady and photographer Steve Pyke. Pyke’s photographs–portraits,...
Celebrated poet, author, artist, essayist, and activist Breyten Breytenbach was born in 1939 in the Western Cape and studied Fine Arts at the University of Cape Town, before leaving the country in 1959. His literary debut Catastrophes (1964), a volume of stories, was followed by The Iron Cow Must Sweat . The latter was...
I started school in St. Canice’s at the age of seven. My future comrade Dermot Bolger sat in the next door classroom, though it would be 10 years before we were formally introduced. Our classrooms looked out at St. Canice’s Church. On my way home after school, I used to stop and sit in...
Anatoly Kudryavitsky was born in Moscow on Chekhov Street. That’s why his father, a great fan of Anton Chekhov, always called his son Anthony, but his mother kept calling him Anatoly; the subject his parents never agreed on. Anyway, he feels comfortable using either name or both. Anatoly was born in Russia; however his...
Poetry is a pink apron. Recently, I remembered wearing a pink apron when I was nine years old and went to the girl’s school the: Ecole Frederic Mistral in Menton on the Cote d’Azur in France. The apron, our uniform in class, was something I had never worn in Holland, the country where I...
Tom Mathews has been described by the Irish Times as “an Institution in Dublin for 30 years”. His own description is equally compelling: “Tom Mathews (Born 1952) is well over four feet tall. “Tom Mathews (Born 1952) is well over four feet tall. His Cupid’s bow legs and long flaming red nose have made...
My first memory is of standing in a hospital cot at night, looking over the cot bars to a rocking horse on the other side of the ward. There were coloured rings over the ward door. Utter silence, though there must have been the hum of traffic from the Holloway Road in London. The...