Irish Writers in London, Summer School - Short Course

During its 20-year history, the Summer School has hosted over 90 different writers including Edna O'Brien, Eimear McBride, Matthew Sweeney, Emma Donoghue, Ronan Bennett, Martina Evans, Maurice Leitch, Julia O'Faolain, Shane Connaughton, Anne Devlin, Blake Morrison, Polly Devlin, John Healy and Jess Kidd.

The Summer School was founded in 1996 by Tony Murray, who will also be teaching on the course again this year. He has taught English Literature and Irish Studies for many years and is also Curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain. Tony has published widely on literary and cultural representations of migration and diaspora and his book, London Irish Fictions: Narrative, Diaspora and Identity was published by Liverpool University Press in 2012. More about Tony Murray.

Kit de Waal was born in Birmingham to an Irish mother and Caribbean father. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law, for social services and the Crown Prosecution Service. She is a founding member of Leather Lane Writers and Oxford Narrative Group and has won numerous awards for her short stories and flash fiction. My Name Is Leon, her debut novel won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2017 and was shortlisted for numerous other awards including the Costa First Book Award and the Desmond Elliott Prize. In 2019, she published Becoming Dinah, a novel for young adults and edited Common People: An Anthology of Working-Class Writers. Kit joins us to discuss The Trick to Time, a novel about a young female Irish migrant in Birmingham which explores grief, longing and a love that lasts a lifetime.

Catherine Heaney grew up in Dublin and worked as a journalist and editor at various magazines and for the publisher Fourth Estate before moving to London where she became head of Faber and Faber’s creative writing school from 2011 to 2014. In 2016 she edited a volume of essays, Trinity Tales: TCD in the 1990s, published by Lilliput Press. She is currently a director of the Estate of Seamus Heaney, working with publishers and cultural organisations in Ireland and beyond to preserve and promote her father's work. Catherine joins us to discuss her career and, in particular, her role (alongside her mother and siblings) in editing the recent anthology, Seamus Heaney: 100 Poems.

Lin Coughlan came from Dublin to London in the 1980s and has been writing drama for stage, screen and radio for over three decades. As well as plays such as The Miracle, produced at the National Theatre in 2008, she has a long-established reputation for work that relies on strong relationships with community theatre groups such as Red Ladder and Half Moon. She has numerous credits on British and Irish television, including EastEnders and accolades include the Peggy Ramsey Award and the Dennis Potter Play of the Year Award. She has also run creative writing programmes at the University of Oxford, the Arvon Foundation and Holloway Prison. In 2019, she was made a Fellow of The Rose Bruford College of Speech and Drama. Lin joins us to discuss her radio dramatisation of Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 last autumn.

Peter Flanagan is an Irish writer and comic based in London. After studying Philosophy and Political Science in Trinity College Dublin, he left Ireland for Australia in 2012, where he started performing stand-up and appeared at the Perth International Comedy Festival that same year. He now performs at the top comedy clubs and festivals around Ireland, the UK and Europe. He has written dozens of short stories and columns exploring the Irish emigrant experience in the UK and beyond and is currently writing his first novel. Peter joins us to discuss his widely-read column for the Irish Times which amongst other subjects has commented on the impact of Brexit on the Irish community in Britain.

Maria C. McCarthy was born in 1959 and raised in a community of Irish migrants in Epsom, Surrey. Her Irish heritage features strongly in her writing. She is the author of two poetry collections: strange fruits(2011) and There are Boats on the Orchard (2017) published by Cultured Llama. She has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from the University of Kent and was winner of the Society of Authors’ Tom-Gallon Trust Award 2015 for her story, More Katharine than Audrey. Maria joins us to discuss this and other short stories from As Long As It Takes (2014), a collection of interwoven tales about the lost generation of Irish women who sailed to England to look for work in the middle of the twentieth century, described by Martina Evans as, "dark, impeccably minimalistic stories about immigrant mothers and their English-born daughters".