Panel with Jan Carson, Jarred McGinnis and Saeida Rouass
Free, ticketed
Writers Jan Carson, Jarred McGinnis and Saeida Rouass discuss how they've found writing during the current pandemic. Has the Covid era changed how they write, and how has lockdown impacted on their creativity and writing lives? Have they been able to find inspiration amongst all the doom and gloom, and is there a new digital landscape for writers? Find out how our panellists have coped as writers over the last year, and perhaps even learn the odd tip for finding motivation, maintaining health and well-being, and coping with increased isolation. Feel free to ask questions!
All of our panellists will also be offering workshops over the weekend of the Writers’ Gathering. Find out more from our full programme. Book your ticket here.
How to watch: Once you have booked using our online ticketing site, you will receive a direct link to the event as well as a reminder 30 minutes before it starts. Don’t forget to check your spam folder in case the email ends up in there! You will also be able to watch the event live-streamed to our website, YouTube channel and our Facebook page.
About the speakers:
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Her second novel, The Fire Starters, won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019, the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize 2020. Jan won the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition in 2016 and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Story Prize and Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize. Her latest short story collection, The Last Resort, has just been published by Doubleday (April 2021).
Jarred McGinnis is co-founder of The Special Relationship, which was chosen for the British Council’s International Literature Showcase. He was the creative director for ‘Moby-Dick Unabridged’, a four-day immersive multimedia reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the Southbank Centre, involving hundreds of participants. His short fiction has been commissioned for BBC Radio 4 and appeared in respected journals in the UK, Canada, USA and Ireland. Jarred’s debut novel, The Coward, a work of autofiction, is published by Canongate (July 2021).
Saeida Rouass is the author of Eighteen Days of Spring in Winter set in Cairo during the Arab Spring, and historical crime novel Assembly of the Dead set in Marrakesh in 1906. She has also contributed to anthologies including We Wrote in Symbols: Lust and Erotica by Arab Women (Saqi, April 2021). She was one of the commissioned artists for the Arab British Centre’s Theatre of the East project and is a 2019 Churchill Fellow with her work exploring misogyny and white supremacy in the USA. She is currently working on the sequel to Assembly of the Dead.