*This event is now available to view online.

Renowned international literary critic John Self will host a panel with authors Bernie McGill and Wendy Erskine to discuss their recent short story collections This Train Is For and Dance Move, and the importance of the short story genre.

Bernie McGill is the author of two novels, The Watch House, (2017, Tinder Press), nominated for the Ireland/European Prize for Literature, and The Butterfly Cabinet, (2011, Headline Review), and one previous short story collection Sleepwalkers, (2013, Whittrick Press), shortlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her short fiction has been nominated for numerous awards and in 2008 she won the Zoetrope: All-Story Short Fiction Award in the USA. Her work has been anthologised in award-winning collections including The Long Gaze Back, The Glass Shore, Her Other Language, The Danger & the Glory, Belfast Stories, and Female Lines. She has been the recipient of numerous Arts Council of Northern Ireland Awards, and is a former Writing Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University, Belfast. She now works as a Lector and Associate Fellow for the Royal Literary Fund, and offers One-to-one mentoring via the Irish Writers’ Centre. This Train is For was published by No Alibis Press in June 2022.

Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her debut collection, Sweet Home, was published by The Stinging Fly Press in Sept 2018 and Picador in 2019, has been translated into Italian and Arabic and optioned for TV. It won the 2020 Butler Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2019 and longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019. The story ‘Inakeen’ was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Prize 2019. Sweet Home was Book of the Year in the Guardian, The White Review, Observer, New Statesman, and TLS. Wendy’s second collection of stories, Dance Move, was published in February 2022. Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Female Lines: New Writing from Northern Ireland and Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber) and read on BBC Radio 4.

This event will be both in person and streamed online. Booking is essential. To book a place in the audience tel. 028 9050 9210 or email: chichester.library@librariesni.org.uk

To book a place for the live stream email: events@librariesni.org.uk

To download the full programme of events for Book Week NI, including talks by Serena Terry, Leesa Harker, Professor Teresa Cremin, Colin Bateman, Rev. Richard Coles, Donal Ryan, Steve Cavanagh and Stuart Neville visit Libraries NI.