Cork Short Story Festival: Eight highlights to check out
Donal Ryan, Cónal Creedon and Wendy Erskine are all on the bill for Cork's Short Story Festival
Nenagh native Donal Ryan has been making waves for some time now. A lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick, the Tipperary author has six novels to his name and a short story collection. He has won several awards for his fiction, including the European Union Prize for Literature and four Irish Book Awards, and his work has been translated into more than 20 languages. Sarah Harte will moderate this event.
- Cork Arts Theatre, Wednesday, 7pm
- Tickets €5, available from corkartstheatre.com
Karina Tynan has updated many episodes from the classic Irish saga Táin Bó Cúailnge in short stories told from the perspective of several leading women characters. She will read from the book and be lead in discussion by poet Adam Wyeth whose own book The Hidden World of Poetry surveys the treatment many contemporary poets have given to revised visions of various classic Irish sagas.
- Cork Arts Theatre, Wednesday, 9.30pm
- Tickets €5 available from corkartstheatre.com
Jānis Joņevs and Daina Tabūna are two young Latvian fiction writers whose work examines the ideological challenges of living in a post-Soviet, post-Leninist society. They will read from their work and with the poet Patrick Cotter will discuss their creative process and the wider social issues implied by their work.
- Cork Arts Theatre, Thursday 7pm
- Tickets €5 available from corkartstheatre.com
Lauren O'Donovan, an Irish-Canadian writer from Cork, will moderate this panel event featuring Kinsale native Niamh Prior and Dubliner Stephen Walsh.
- Cork Arts Theatre, Thursday, 9.30pm
- Tickets €5 available from corkartstheatre.com
An event to mark the publication of Art Imitating Life Imitating Death (an exploration of Guests Of The Nation by Frank O’Connor) by Cork writer and documentarian Cónal Creedon.
In 2003, the former Writer in Residence at University College Cork was commissioned by RTÉ to adapt Guests of the Nation for radio as part of the Frank O’Connor Centenary Celebrations. It was a voyage of discovery that led him on a circuitous route to the Irish War of Independence, and the execution of Major Compton Smith on a hillside bog in Donoughmore County Cork.
- Crawford Art Gallery, Friday 12.30pm
- Fringe event
Belfast-based Wendy Erskine and Galway's Alan McMonagle will be led in conversation by Cork writer Danny Denton in one of the must-see events of the festival. Wendy Erskine's debut short story collection, Sweet Home won the 2020 Butler Literary Award and has been optioned for TV. Alan McMonagle has published two collections of short stories, Psychotic Episodes and Liar Liar.
- Cork Arts Theatre, Friday, 7pm
- Tickets €5 available from corkartstheatre.com
Elizabeth McCracken is the author of seven books, and recently published a collection of short stories, The Souvenir Museum. Her work has been published in The Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize and the New York Times Magazine. Mary Morrissy is the author of three novels with a fourth, Penelope Unbound, forthcoming in 2023. Cork's Billy O'Callaghan will moderate.
- Cork Arts Theatre, Saturday, 7pm
- Tickets €5 available from corkartstheatre.com
Ron Rash is the author of the novel Serena, along with six other novels, five collections of poems and six collections of short stories, among them Burning Bright, which won the 2010 Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. The event will be moderated by writer Alannah Hopkin.
Cork's annual Short Story Festival will run from October 12 - 15. For more information see corkshortstory.net
