Featuring Paul McVeigh, Bernie McGill & Jan Carson at Duncairn Arts Centre, Duncairn Avenue, Belfast.

Chaired by Marnie Kennedy, Shared Reading facilitator. This event is hosted by Stories@theDuncairn, a volunteer-led, community literary project, in partnership with the Greater New Lodge Community Festival and Féile an Phobail. Café at the Duncairn open for tea, coffee and refreshments. Wine Reception. All welcome!

Doors open at 6.30pm

Paul McVeigh’s short stories have been in numerous anthologies including ‘Being Various’, ‘The Art of the Glimpse’ and ‘Common People’. They have also been printed in ‘The London Magazine’, ‘The Stinging Fly’ and ‘The Irish Times’, on radio at BBC 3, 4, 5; RTE 1, and Sky TV. His ten-part short story series, ‘The Circus’, appeared on BBC Radio 4 in 2023. Paul co-founded the London Short Story Festival and is associate director of Word Factory, ‘the UK’s national organisation for excellence in the short story’ The Guardian.  Paul’s debut novel, ‘The Good Son’, won The McCrea Literary Award and The Polari First Novel Prize. His writing has been translated into seven languages.

Bernie McGill is the 2023 winner of the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train is For (No Alibis Press). She is the author of two novels: The Watch House (nominated for the Ireland European Union Prize for Literature in 2019) and The Butterfly Cabinet (2010) and of one further short story collection, Sleepwalkers (2013). Her work has appeared in a number of anthologies and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Bernie works as a Mentor for the Irish Writers’ Centre and is an Associate Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund.

Jan Carson’s critically acclaimed writings explore themes related to identity, place and belonging, but also to angst and alienation, in such works as The Fire Starters (winner EU Prize for Literature, 2019) and The Raptures. She is also very funny! About her latest collection of short stories, Quickly, While They Still Have Horses, the Irish Times said: ‘Long after the reader has closed the book, these tales linger in the mind: vivid, original and moving.’