Irish Writers' Weekend: The Past in the Present

Anne Enright and Doireann Ní Ghríofa in conversation with Alex Clark.

Anne Enright and Doireann Ní Ghríofa join one of our leading literary journalists, Alex Clark, to explore the interplay between the past and present in writing. For this special session to open the first full day of the Irish Writers’ Weekend, they explore the ways that voices and stories have been both heard and overlooked across time – and also documented and re-created by Ireland’s writers, including themselves.

Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s most celebrated writers of fiction and non fiction. A Booker Prize-winner for The Gathering and The Writers' Prize for Fiction winner for The Wren, the Wren, her novels frequently draw on the deep seated histories and traumas of families and of Ireland itself. Doireann Ní Ghríofa has brought her skills as a poet to two acclaimed prose works A Ghost in the Throat and this year’s Said the Dead, both of which entwine stories from earlier times, especially of women, with a present-day narrator based on herself.

Part of the British Library Irish Writers' Weekend 2026.

Her eight novels include The Gathering, which won the 2007 Man Booker Prize and The Wren, The Wren which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and won the Writers' Prize for Fiction in 2024. She has written two collections of stories, published together as Yesterday's Weather, one book of non-fiction, Making Babies and the 2025 essay collection Attention. Other awards include the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction for The Forgotten Waltz, the Irish Book Awards Lifetime Achievement Award and Novel of the Year (which she has won twice), the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature and the Seamus Heaney Award for Arts and Letters, and a Windham-Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2025. In 2015 she was appointed as the first Laureate for Irish Fiction.

This year she published Said the Dead, a #1 Irish Times bestseller. Her breakthrough work, A Ghost in the Throat (2020) blended memoir, poetry, and literary translation, intertwining the author’s life with that of 18th-century poet Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill. It won the James Tait Black Prize for Biography, the An Post Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is also the author of seven books of poetry both in Irish and English including Résheoid, Dúlasair, Clasp, Lies and To Star the Dark. Her literary awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and The Ostana Prize. She lives in Cork.

A co-host of Graham Norton’s Book Club and the Times Literary Supplement podcast, she is also a regular on BBC Radio 4 and writes on a wide range of subjects for the Guardian, the Observer and the Irish Times. She is a patron of the Cambridge Literary Festival, and has judged many literary awards, including the Booker prize. She lives in Kilkenny, Ireland.