Lucy Caldwell & Jan Carson
Two of Belfast’s best-loved writers return to BIAF to discuss the art of the short story.
Lucy Caldwell’s new collection Intimacies: More Stories follows her much-lauded last collection of stories Multitudes, and affirms her status as one of our finest practitioners of short fiction. It explores the challenges faced by young women today, from the woman next door to celebrity survivors such as Sinead O’Connor and Britney Spears. The Guardian called Intimacies “outstanding.” Lucy Caldwell lives in London and Belfast and will publish her long-awaited fourth novel These Days in March 2022.
Jan Carson’s The Last Resort is a collection of stories set in a fictional Northern Irish caravan park, and a wide-ranging exploration of the people who live there and the ways in which they – and we – are similar but different. The stories in The Last Resort were broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in early 2021 and the collection was called “a work of great empathy and imagination” by The Irish Times. Jan Carson is the author of six books and lives in Belfast.
Hosted by Hilary Copeland
This event is subject to 1m social distancing guidelines.
Writing Workshop – Weird, Wild And Wonderful Stories with Lucy Caldwell
- Saturday 23 October | 2.00 – 4.00pm | £25 | 16 Yrs +
We are delighted, in partnership with Crescent Arts Centre, to present this exclusive workshop with the incredible writer and Belfast Book Festival Patron Lucy Caldwell. So as the days draw in, come and set your imagination alight!
We’ve all spent too much time, this last unprecedented while, trapped in the prisons of ourselves. In this exclusive workshop, you will play with the weird and the wild and the wonderful, tapping into the power of fairytales, folklore and myth and of modern retellings of the most ancient and haunting stories.
You’ll look at how some of the most exciting contemporary writers from this part of the world use magical realist elements, and how you can be inspired by them.
All levels and stages welcome: all you need to bring is yourself (and the child-self who read compulsively under the covers by torchlight, or hid their copy of The Witches in the freezer…)