Irish Writers' Weekend: Altered States

Jan Carson and Keith Ridgway in conversation with Brian Dillon.

Alternate worlds in fiction take many forms, and in new works by some of Irelands most accomplished writers, the subtle shifts in reality they conjure up play out in powerful and memorable ways.

In Few and Far Between Jan Carson imagines that Britain’s largest lake, Lough Neagh in Northern Ireland, is drained to create a brand new county and a series of utopian but vulnerable island communities. In the fabulous and funny Dooneen by Keith Ridgway, a mysterious portal leads to an exile in an uncanny version of Dublin in the midst of revolutionary turmoil. Told as a love letter, it brings to mind Alice in Wonderland , Lanark and the Beckett Trilogy. And in In Water in the Desert Fire in the Night, the evocative debut novel by Gethan Dick, a group of travellers seek refuge in the wake of an unstoppable pandemic

This entertaining journey into the possibilities, playfulness and politics of their stories is hosted by essayist Brian Dillon.

Part of the British Library Irish Writers' Weekend 2026.

Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland, 2019. The Raptures was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast in 2025, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has achieved the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between was published by Doubleday UK and Scribner in the US.

His collection of stories Standard Time won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second novel, The Parts, alongside his novella, Horses, was short-listed for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award 2003. His novel, A Shock, was shortlisted for the 2021 Goldsmith Prize and was won the 2022 James Tait Black Prize for Fiction. His new novel, Dooneen, was published by Fitzcarraldo this year. He lives in London.

His books include Ambivalence, Affinities, Essayism, The Great Explosion (shortlisted for the Ondaatje Prize), Objects in This Mirror: Essays, I Am Sitting in a Room, Sanctuary, Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (shortlisted for the Wellcome Book Prize) and In the Dark Room, which won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, New York Times, London Review of Books, the New Yorker, New York Review of Books, frieze and Artforum. He has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries. He lives in London.