Irish Writers' Weekend: The Art of the Memoir

Brian Dillon, Sinéad Morrissey and Tim MacGhabhann with Peter Curran.

In her tender, funny memoir Amongst Communists poet Sinéad Morrissey follows her upbringing during the Troubles, where family life in the cultural milieu of Belfast Communism focused on East Germany and the utopia of the USSR rather than the conflict raging around. In Ambivalence Brian Dillon tracks his adolescent and early adult journey through the Dublin of the 1980s and 1990s, and the unfolding of radical thinking about literature and life. And the darkly humorous The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting by Tim MacGabhann is simultaneously wild and poetic, unflinchingly honest, heart-wrenching and life-affirming.

They talk to broadcaster Peter Curran about the multiple ways of remembering and writing the self and the past.

Part of the British Library Irish Writers' Weekend 2026.

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.

She has published six collections with Carcanet, a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020) and the memoir Among Communists (2026). Her awards include the 2013 T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, as well as a Lannan Literary Fellowship, First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition, two Irish Times Awards and the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). Her collection On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 she was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdańsk, Poland and has served as Belfast Poet Laureate. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University.

He is also autor of the short story collection Saints, the memoir The Black Pool, and the poetry collection Found in a Context of Destruction. He is a Fellow of the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and an Arts Council Literary Bursary and Royal Literary Fund awardee.

Peter has won international awards for his work with communities in the USA, Ireland, Arctic and India, most recently on the complex entwined history of Caribbean and Irish people in No Blacks No Irish for Radio 4. Peter created the audio comedy of middle-age torments, Bunk Bed with playwright Patrick Marber. He's been a trained bereavement support volunteer with Cruse for many years. His own memoir, an account of family and events as a Belfast youth during the 1970's will be published by Hachette in April 2027.