Born in Belfast in 1981, Lucy Caldwell is the multi–award winning author of three novels, several stage plays and radio dramas and, most recently, two collections of short stories: Multitudes (Faber, 2016) and Intimacies (forthcoming, Faber, 2020). She is also the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019).
Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Imison Award, the Susan Smith Blackburn Award, the Irish Writers’ and Screenwriters’ Guild Award, the Commonwealth Writers’ Award (Canada & Europe), the Edge Hill Short Story Prize Readers’ Choice Award, a Fiction Uncovered Award, a K. Blundell Trust Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018 and currently a Seamus Heaney Fellow at Queens University Belfast, Lucy Caldwell will be reading from her short story collections and discussing her predicament as a writer born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles: “For a young writer, it feels like a curse, coming from a notorious place. You feel the weight of it like a stone on your chest, crushing other stories out of you. How do you begin your stories when you’re aware that there are more urgent, more devastating stories about that place to be told? It took years to believe that the stories I had of Belfast were in any way worth the telling.” (The Guardian, 8 June 2019)