Presented as part of Imagine Belfast’s online festival 2021

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Sinéad Gleeson’s debut collection of essays: Constellations: Reflections from Life was published in April 2019 by Picador. It has been sold to various countries, including France, Germany and the US, where it will be published in March 2020 by HMH Books. Previously her essays have been published in Granta, Winter Papers (edited by Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith) Gorse, Elsewhere: A Journal of Place, Autumn: An Anthology for the Changing Seasons and Banshee.

Other publications include, The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, edited by Sinéad, featuring 30 short stories, including work by Maeve Brennan, Anne Enright, Elizabeth Bowen, Eimear McBride, and Lisa McInerney. It won the Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards in 2015. Its successor, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women from the North of Ireland, also won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards in 2016. In 2012 she edited the short story anthology, Silver Threads of Hope, which featured authors Kevin Barry, Emma Donoghue, Colum McCann, Mary Costello, Roddy Doyle and more. In Autumn 2020, Head of Zeus published The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories, edited by Sinéad.

In 2019, Sinéad was the Writer in Residence at University College Dublin, teaching on the Creative Writer MFA and MA courses. She is currently working on a novel. Previously, she worked as a journalist and broadcaster, presenting The Book Show on RTÉ Radio One for four years. She regularly moderates and chairs panel events.

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, (Liberties Press), two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories 1 and 2 (Emma Press). Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019 and won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland in 2019 and the Kitschies Award for speculative fiction 2020. She was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2020. She is currently community outreach officer on an AHRC funded research project based at QUB which is exploring how Dementia is depicted in fiction. She has two books forthcoming in 2021: The Last Resort (short stories) and No Promised Land (novel).