Heather Ingman

Heather Ingman was born in England but has lived in Ireland since 1980. She works in the School of English, Trinity College, Dublin where she teaches women’s writing and Irish writing. Elizabeth Bowen is one of her favourite authors and she has written extensively on Bowen’s work in her books Women’s Fiction Between the Wars: Mothers, Daughters and Writing (Edinburgh University Press, 1998), Twentieth-Century Fiction by Irish Women: Nation and Gender (Ashgate, 2007) and A History of the Irish Short Story (Cambridge University Press, 2009). Heather is also a novelist. During
the 1990s she published a series of novels with Attic Press, Poolbeg and Fourth Estate.

Tom McAlindon

Tom McAlindon is currently Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Hull. He was born in Northern Ireland in 1932, received his early education in Belfast, and studied for the BA and MA in U.C.C. and for the PhD in Cambridge, where he worked under the direction of C.S.Lewis. His published work extends over a wide area, from Greek and Medieval romance to the poetry of Yeats and the novels of Joseph Conrad and William Trevor. His main interest, however, has been in Renaissance studies, to which he has contributed six books on the plays of Shakespeare and his major contemporaries, including English Renaissance Tragedy (1986), Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (1991) and Shakespeare Minus “Theory”(2004). His recent work has been of a historical and biographical nature: Bloodstains in Ulster: the Notorious Case of Robert the Painter (2006), an account of sectarian murder and political subversion of the law; and Two Brothers, Two Wars: from the Western Front to the Burmese Jungle (2008), a memoir dealing with the experiences of his two uncles during WW I and WW II.

Dr.Eibhear Walsh

Dr Eibhear Walshe is a senior lecturer in the Department of Modern English at University College Cork. His biography Kate O’Brien A Writing Life was published by Irish Academic Press in 2006 and he edited Elizabeth Bowen: Visions and Revisions for Irish Academic Press in 2008. He was a section editor for The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing: Volume 4 (Cork University Press, 2002); a contributor to the New Dictionary of Biography (Oxford University Press,2004) and guest edited The Irish Review in 2000. His other publications include the edited collections, Ordinary People Dancing: Essays on Kate O’Brien (Cork University Press 1993); Sex, Nation and Dissent (Cork University Press: 1997); Elizabeth Bowen Remembered (Four Courts Press: 1999) and The Plays of Teresa Deevy (Mellen Press: 2003.) He co-edited, with Brian Cliff, Representing the Troubles (Four Courts: 2004) and Molly Keane: Centenary Essays (Four Courts: 2006) with Gwenda Young. He has completed a study of Wilde and Modern Ireland. Collins Press published his memoir, Cissie’s Abattoir, in 2009.

Dr. Phyllis Lassner

Dr. Phyllis B. Lassner (Professor, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois) teaches in the Jewish Studies, Gender Studies and Writing Programs at Northwestern University. She has written two books on the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen namely Elizabeth Bowen: A Feminist Study. London: Macmillan, 1990 and The Short Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1991. Her most recent publication on Bowen, which she co-authored with one of her graduate students, titled “Domestic Gothic: the Global Primitive and Gender Relations in Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September and The House in Paris,” appears in the volume Irish Modernism and the Global Primitive, edited by Maria McGarrity and Claire Culleton (Palgrave 2009).

She has published several books including Women Writers of World War II, Colonial Strangers: Women Writing the End of the British Empire and, most recently, Anglo Jewish Women writing the Holocaust. She has written many articles about interwar and wartime women writers and she has co-edited the volume, Antisemitism and Philosemitism in the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries. She has also written introductions to Ava Kadishson Schieber’s book of autobiographical Holocaust stories, poems, and drawings, Soundless Roar and Karen Gershon’s autobiographies and novels. Dr. Lassner also serves on the Northwestern University Press Board and on the advisory and editorial boards of several scholarly journals.

Professor Maurice Harmon

Maurice Harmon is Emeritus Professor of Anglo- Irish Litreature and drama at University College Dublin. A respected and internationally known scholar and critic with an extensive bibilography of published work, he has held a number of professorships in universities in America and Europe. In 1990 he took early retirement from university teaching in order to devote himself to writing. His books include Seán O’ Faoláin : A Life (1994) and The Dolmen Press: A Celebration (2001) He has edited No Author Better Served - The Correspondence between Samuel Beckett and Alan Schneider (1998) and translated the medieval Irish compendium of
stories and poems The Colloquy of the Old Men (2001).

His most recent publications are Selected Essays (2006), Thomas Kinsella: Designing for the Exact Needs (2008) and The Dialogue of the Ancients of Ireland (Acallam na Senorach), translated with introduction and notes, 2009.

Dr Harmon is also a poet. His collections include The Last Regatta (2000), The Doll with Two Backs and other poems (2008) and When Love is not Enough: New and Selected Poems will be published in June 2010.

Afric McGlinchey

Afric McGlinchey, a freelance journalist and poet, has been facilitating creative writing workshops for eight years and a number of her students have gone on to win short story competitions. Her work has appeared in many journals in Ireland, Scotland and England, including the SHOp, Scottish Literary Review, Acumen, Tear in the Fence, Poetry Ireland Review and Southword. She writes book reviews, articles and features for the Irish Examiner, Irish Independent and Munster Interiors. She is also a reader for the Fish Short Story Competition. You can visit her website at

Julian Gough

Julian Gough was born in London. He grew up in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary. He lives in Berlin.
And he writes novels.

While studying philosophy at University in Galway, he began singing with the underground, and very literary, rock band, Toasted Heretic.

Gough’s first novel, Juno & Juliet was published in 2001. His second novel, Jude, is a rather unusual novel, and is being published in a rather unusual way, starting with Jude: Level 1.

Jude: Level 1 is part of a hugely ambitious attempt to write the funniest serious novel of the new millennium. Thus Jude, seven years in the writing, turned out to be so magnificently original that every major publisher in Britain (after likening Gough to Beckett, Joyce, Swift and Voltaire), rejected it. In the meantime, having been evicted, Julian ended up living for nothing in a delightful house in the French countryside, a brisk 8 kilometre walk from the nearest shop. This, combined with being too broke to smoke or drink, has had the happy side effect of making him perhaps the fittest author of his generation.

He was greatly relieved when Old Street Publishing snapped up Jude with cries of joy. Old Street is now, in fairytale fashion, being rewarded for its courage. The prologue to Jude: Level 1, a story called “The Orphan and the Mob” won the 2007 BBC Short Story Prize, the biggest short story prize on earth. Julian can afford to pay rent again, though not in Ireland. Or England. (He’s now in Berlin. It’s cheap).

He is after spending a week at the Cuirt festival in Galway where he just launched his new book entitled Free, Sex, Chocolate: Poems and Songs published by Salmon Poetry.

Bernard O’ Donoghue

Bernard O’Donoghue, born in 1945, is a leading Irish poet, critic and anthologist, whose literary and academic career has been conducted in Oxford since the mid-1960s. His ‘day job’ teaching Medieval Literature has resulted in a number of scholarly works, notably his anthology The Courtly Love Tradition (1982), a selection of European love poetry mostly of the 12th to 13th centuries from Latin, Provencal and Italian sources including the troubadours, Cavalcanti and Dante. His collection, Gunpowder, won the Whitbread Poetry prize in 1995. More recently he has produced a translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (2006), praised by Seamus Heaney in the Irish Times as the work of ‘a scholar and a gentleman’. His “Selected Poems” was published in 2008 by Faber as well as the Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney (2009). He received the Cholmondeley Award in 2009. Bernard says of himself “I grew up, in Cullen, in rural North Cork, in a place famous for traditional music and for poetry in Irish from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These things led to deep-rooted interests in linguistic things, and especially literature, both written and oral”.

Tom Aherne

Tom Aherne is a native of Skeheen and following his early education in Mitchelstown C.B.S., he graduated in medicine from U.C.C. in 1974. He returned to Ireland in 1985 from the University of California to the position of Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon in the Cork University Hospital.

The acquisition of an old house helped to develop Tom’s interest in the heritage of Irish Georgian Architecture and Decorative Arts. The country houses of the 18th and early 19th centuries are testimony to the superb Irish craftsmanship of the period.

From this society emerged the architects of the Irish literary revival. They were also to dominate the development of modern Irish literature. Their legacy to Ireland and the wider world is considerable, as Yeats said “they were no petty people.”

Tom is a member of the Irish Georgian Society, the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society and the Kerry Archaeological and Historical Society.