Donal Ryan, from Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, is the author of six bestselling books. He has won numerous awards for his fiction, among them the European Union Prize for Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and three Irish Book Awards, and has been shortlisted for several more, including the Costa Book Award, the IMPAC award and the Prix Jean Monet de Littérature Européenne.

He was nominated for the Booker Prize in 2013 for his debut novel, The Spinning Heart, and again in 2018, for his fourth novel, From A Low and Quiet Sea.

His work has been adapted for stage and screen and translated into over twenty languages. The Spinning Heart was voted Irish Book of the Decade in 2016 in a nationwide poll run by Dublin Book Festival. His latest novel, Strange Flowers, set in Nenagh and London, was published in August 2020 by Penguin Random House.

A law graduate and former civil servant, Donal has lectured in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick since 2014 and lives in Castletroy with his wife Anne Marie and their two children.

Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He is a member of Aosdana, the elected Assembly of artists and writers in Ireland.

He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing Program, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (Dolmen Press, 1978), The Sorrow Garden (Anvil Poetry, 1981), The Non-Aligned Storyteller (Anvil Poetry, 1984), Seven Winters in Paris (Anvil Poetry, 1989), Lost Province (Anvil Poetry, 1996), Merchant Prince (Anvil Poetry, 2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (Anvil Poetry, 2009) and Pandemonium (Carcanet Press, 2016).

He has also published two novels, Without Power (Poolbeg, 1981) and Asya and Christine (Poolbeg, 1992) as well as two works of non-fiction, Gardens of Remembrance (New Island, 1996) and Out of the Ashes (Cork City Libraries, 2006). He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award.

He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review. His work has been translated into Italian, Portuguese, Chinese, French, Japanese and several other languages.

His work has been republished in more than thirty anthologies of Irish poetry, most notably in Anthology of Irish Poetry (Harvard University Press, 2013), and The Wake Forest Series of Irish Poetry: Volume II (Wake Forest University Press, 2010).

His tenth collection, Prophecy, was published by Carcanet Press in April, 2019.

Geraldine Mitchell was born in Dublin, but when she returned to Ireland after more than twenty years teaching and working as a journalist in Algeria, France and Spain, she decided to make her home on the Co Mayo coast, just west of Louisburgh. It was here that she started to send poems out for publication.

She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2008 and has since published three collections of poems with Arlen House: World Without Maps (2011), Of Birds and Bones (2014) and most recently Mountains for Breakfast (2017). Her fourth collection will be published later this year, Covid permitting.

Mountains for Breakfast was the focus and inspiration of an exhibition by four visual artists, including her printmaker daughter, Lisa Molina, which was shown in Galway as part of Cuirt 2018. Geraldine and Lisa are at present working together on a series of poems and prints with translations into French and Irish.

Geraldine has also written two novels for young people and a biography.

Helena Close is a native of Limerick, and has been writing full time for the past 20 years. She has published eight novels, four of which were co-written. Her latest novel, The Gone book, was published in April, 2020. Her short story “Harbour” was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport International Short Story Prize 2016. She holds a Masters (first class honours) in Creative Writing from University of Limerick. Her play, Red Army, co-written with Marie Boylan, will be staged in Lime Tree Theatre, Limerick, in September 2021. She is currently working on her fifth novel and a collection of short stories. She is Munster Rugby obsessed, loves cats and dogs and sometimes people.

The Gone Book | Published April 2020 | Little Island

Received critical acclaim on RTE Arena and a recommended read on the Today with Sean O’Rourke show on RTE Radio One.
“From the memorable first line right through to the dramatic conclusion, the story hurtles along at a rapid rate, riding the crest of a massive wave and finally throwing its reader on Lahinch’s shoreline with a thump”
– Book Ireland Magazine – Sine Quinn

“A skillful and truthful novel from a wonderful storyteller”
– Joseph O’Connor

“Dark and gritty and desperately sad and wildly funny, this is as real as writing gets. I was locked inside of Matt’s head for the duration, and I lived his whole mad summer. Every line rings perfectly true.”
-Donal Ryan

“Gritty and funny, but also tragic, it’s a fast and furious ride”
– Annie-Books.com

The Clever One | Published March 2011 | Hachette Ireland

“Bravely written, raw, funny, at times politically incorrect but always captivating, The Clever One explores the boundaries of love, loyalty, family ties and the lengths we are prepared to go to in protecting them. An impressive, relevant, and entertaining read. An absolute page turner.”
– The Irish Independent

The Cut of Love | Published March 2009 | Hachette Ireland

“Extraordinary, a remarkable book that expands the frontiers of Irish popular fiction.”
– The Irish Times

“This is a fantastic book, both heart –wrenching and rewarding at the same time.”
– The RTE Guide

Pinhead Duffy | Published March 2005 | Blackstaff Press.

“…a born Storyteller”
“…a coming of age story that’s truly affecting, bittersweet and acutely observant…”
– The Irish Times

“…a tender yet hilarious narrative”
– The Irish Examiner

ANNEMARIE NÍ CHURREÁIN is a poet from the Donegal Gaeltacht. Her publication list includes Bloodroot (Doire Press, 2017) Town (The Salvage Press, 2018) and The Foundling Crib (Solstice Arts, 2020).

Her work has been shortlisted for the Shine Strong Award for best first collection in Ireland and for the 2018 Julie Suk Award in the U.S.A. She has held literary fellowships at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Germany and The Jack Kerouac House of Orlando. According to The Yale Review “Ní Churreáin often captures a whole world of cultural and historical implications in a single, simple, but metaphorically rich image”.

Ní Churreáin is both a recipient of the Next Generation Award from the Arts Council and a co-recipient of the inaugural Markievicz Award. She was 2019-20 Writer-In-Residence at The National University of Ireland Maynooth. Ní Churreáin is a 2020 Artist in Residence at Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris.

More information at studiotwentyfive.com

A former All-Ireland Slam poetry champion, Stephen Murphy first rose to prominence back in 2014 when a video for a poem called Was it for this? was recorded outside his barn and uploaded to Youtube.

The poem served as a clarion call to what would go on to become the Right2Water movement, and having delivered it outside the GPO on O’Connell Street at the first Right2Water demonstration in October 2014, Stephen’s name would go on to become synonymous with the movement itself, having gone on to perform his poetry at six of the nine national demonstrations, to tens of thousands of people on each occasion.

Such was the impact of ‘Was it for this?’, that Stephen was invited to take part in ‘Glórtha 1916′ in Liberty Hall on Easter Saturday 2016, and was the only poet to perform at the Citizens’ Centenary of the Easter Rising on the 24th of April of the same year. In June, Stephen launched ‘Of Land & Man’, a collaboration of his poetry set to music by former members of the seminal Irish band Whipping Boy, and current members of Kíla, but had already become disillusioned by what he saw as the political quest for power during his involvement with Right2Water, and stepped away from it all to spend more time with his infant son and family.

Mac Tíre – Of Land & Man

In October 2016, Stephen was back on stage, this time delivering a poem called ‘Before you push the chair’ to a packed Abbey Theatre, who rose to applaud when he finished. The crowd included President Michael D. Higgins, who would later interrupt his own speech about Brendan Kennelly to call Stephen ‘A splendid, courageous, and gifted young poet’, whose work brought to mind Ginsberg and ‘Howl.’ President Higgins would later go on to write to Stephen, and invited him to perform at the Bloomsday Garden party in June 2017 at Áras an Uachtaráin.

An Irishman’s Diary – On Brendan Kennelly’s 80th Birthday

Since moving to Limerick three years ago, Stephen has completed a Masters in Creative Writing in the University of Limerick, focusing specifically on developing his technique in prose writing with a view to finishing longer form books that are currently in production. In July of 2018 a recording of Before you push the chair that was recorded in John B. Keane’s pub in Listowel went viral, and coming off the back of its relative success, he was invited to give talks at a series of events, and to take part in panel discussions alongside clinical psychologists and various professors in Mental Health. The reaction to the poem shook him to his core, where-in people were crediting his work with saving their lives, and in many ways the ‘success’ of it made him realise the illusory nature of the online paradigm and our addiction towards it.

In recent times he has been working with RTÉ on a commissioned poem to encapsulate his response to the Coronavirus pandemic called ‘The Language of the Birds‘, but the poem is a response to his own battles with illness at the turn of the year, when, two days after performing to a sold-out Olympia Theatre to mark the end of an Irish tour with David Keenan, he became very seriously ill with what was later diagnosed as Miliary Tuberculosis, and spent over two months in hospital as a result.

To date, three albums of his poetry have been released, two of which are a-capella, and his first full-length poetry collection, From the Sea Hound, was published in Spring 2019. He lives in Castleconnell, with his wife and son and their dog, and is usually found wandering down by the banks of the Shannon.

Eamonn is an accomplished, highly experienced, professional Guitarist. Equally comfortable on Electric or Acoustic Guitar he is proficient in many styles including Jazz, Blues, Rock & Pop, Traditional Irish Music, Slide Guitar, Folk and Classical Music.

He has worked in the U.K , France and here in Ireland with The Abbey, Gaiety, and Olympia Theatres, The RTE National Concert Orchestra, and with The Essential and The Hothouse Big Bands.

Eamonn has performed in The Bord Gais Energy Theatre, J.J.Smyth’s (Ireland’s foremost jazz club), The National Concert Hall, The Conference Centre and Vicar Street among others.

I have honoured to open for Phil Coulter, Sharon Shannon, Emma Langford, Kila. And have guested on the Legend of Luke Kelly Show.

Having a grá for the protest/political/anti-war songs of old, I blend some new self-penned poetry and songs with well-known folk songs that have stood the test of time.

I always welcome the opportunity to take part In Éigse Michael Hartnett as I have such admiration for Michael, one of the greatest modern Irish poets.