Belfast Book Festival 2016 | Page 32

Doire Press Evening Irish Women Short Story Writers With Stephanie Conn, Simon Lewis & Michael J. Whelan With Jan Carson, Mary Morrissy, Roisīn O’Donnell & Rosemary Jenkinson Crescent Arts Centre Tuesday 14 June – 6:45pm Tickets: Free Crescent Arts Centre Tuesday 14 June – 8pm Tickets: £6/£4 Stephanie Conn was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award (2012) and Anam Cara Competition. The following year she was shortlisted in the Red Line Poetry Competition with work selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. In 2015 she was awarded the Yeovil Poetry Prize and the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing. Jan Carson is a writer and community arts development officer based in Belfast. Malcolm Orange Disappears was published by Liberties Press, in 2014. Her short stories have appeared in many journals and in 2014 she received an Arts Council NI Artist’s Career Enhancement Bursary. Her short story collection, Children’s Children was published in 2016. Simon Lewis won the Hennessy Prize for Emerging Poetry and was runner up in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2015. He has been shortlisted for the Listowel Poetry and Bridport Prizes and received commendations in the Gregory O’Donoghue Prize and Dromineer Literary Prize. Michael J. Whelan is an award winning poet, writer and historian. He was 2nd Place Winner in the Patrick Kavanagh International Poetry Awards 2011 (shortlisted 2012), and 3rd Place Winner in the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Awards 2012. His books The Battle of Jadotville & Allegiances Compromised examine Irish military history. Michael’s poetry has been widely published. 32 Mary Morrissy has published three novels – Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey – and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye (1993). She has won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Literary Foundation Award and currently teaches at University College Cork. Rosemary Jenkinson is from Belfast. Her plays include The Bonefire (Stewart Parker BBC Radio Award), Basra Boy, White Star of the North, Ghosts of Drumglass, Planet Belfast, Stitched Up and Here Comes the Night. Writing for radio includes Castlereagh to Kandahar (BBC Radio 3) and The Blackthorn Tree (BBC Radio 4). Aphrodite’s Kiss, was published by Whittrick Press in 2016. Roisīn O’Donnell’s work has been published in journals and anthologies internationally, featuring in Young Irelanders (2015), and in the award-winning anthology The Long Gaze Back (2015). Nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize, she has been shortlisted for several international writing awards, including the Cúirt New Writing Prize, the Brighton Prize, the Wasafiri New Writing Prize and the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award 2016. belfastbookfestival.com 33