Irish Writers' Weekend: Small Towns Big Stories

Eoin McNamee and Niall Williams in conversation with Caoilinn Hughes.

Eoin McNamee is known especially for his stories set amid and against The Troubles, such as Resurrection Man, the Booker longlisted Blue Tango and the semi-autobiographical The Bureau: that blend taught and atmospheric plotting with brilliant realisations of people and their communities. At once realist and magical, contemporary and timeless, his new collection of short prose The Comets takes us into the borderlands and working-class lives caught between love and violence.

In his many novels, including international bestsellers This is Happiness and Four Letters of Love, Niall Williams is a master of portraying tight-knit worlds, mostly in rural Ireland, such as the fictional village of Faha in County Clare to which his new story O Now! returns. He explores how landscape, local history, and communities shape individual identities and the fragile, enduring nature of romantic love, grief, and emotional resilience.

They talk to novelist Caoilinn Hughes, herself one of Ireland’s most accomplished portrayers of dynamics between people and with the places they inhabit.

Part of the British Library Irish Writers' Weekend 2026.

Resurrection Man was later filmed with his own screenplay, his other works include The Ultras, The Blue Trilogy, The Vogue and The Bureau and the new short story collection The Comets. His work has been nominated for and won many major prizes including the Booker Prize, the Gordon Burn Prize, the Kerry Fiction Prize, the Imison Award and the CWA Steel Dagger. Liam McIllvaney said of McNamee's prose that it has the 'cadenced majesty of McCarthy or DeLillo, but the vision it enacts is all his own'. Most recently, Eoin was part of the writers' room for Netflix’s Vikings Valhalla series. He lives in Sligo.

His critically acclaimed and bestselling fiction has been shortlisted for the Irish Times Literature Prize and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the IMPAC Award. Williams’ debut novel Four Letters of Love, an international bestseller, was adapted by the author for screen and starred Helena Bonham-Carter, Pierce Brosnan and Gabriel Byrne. His novel Time of the Child was an instant Irish Times bestseller and was awarded the Kerry Group Novel of the Year Award. He lives in Kiltumper in County Clare.

Her second novel, The Wild Laughter won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and her debut Orchid & the Wasp won the Collyer Bristow Prize. Her short stories have won an O. Henry Award and the Moth Short Story Prize among others. She was recently Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library.