Mary Beckett: A Belfast Woman at Look North! Festival at the Linen Hall Library
2026-02-25 13:00 - 2027-02-02 14:00 (Europe/London) | Linen Hall Library, Belfast, 17 Donegall Square North, Belfast, BT1 5GB, United Kingdom
This event took place on the 25th February 2026. A video recording is now available to view on YouTube.
Born in 1926, Mary Beckett is regarded as one of Belfast’s finest writers. Widely acclaimed for her novels and short stories, especially A Belfast Woman, A Literary Woman and Give Them Stones, her work did much to capture and explore the lives and experiences of women, especially working-class women. To mark the centenary of her birth, The Linen Hall Library in partnership with Look North!, brings together two acclaimed Belfast writers, Anne Devlin and Wendy Erskine, to talk about Beckett’s work and her enduring legacy. This session will be chaired by award-winning novelist and short story writer, Bernie McGill.
Supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.
This event will be hosted by The Linen Hall Library, Belfast on 25th February at 1pm. Tickets £5. Booking details here.

'The Day of the Papering', a new short story by Bernie McGill on BBC Radio 4
2026-06-26 - 2027-06-26 | BBC Radio 4 Short Works, United Kingdom
Set in an abandoned military base at Fort Dunree in Co. Donegal, the story follows artist-in-residence Kayla, on the final day of her residency, as she installs her work in one of the abandoned buildings on the site. She’s being reluctantly helped by caretaker Dermot who has little time for Kayla’s work. The story touches on ‘the mica crisis’ that affected thousands of homes in Donegal from 2011 on.
Read by Amy Molloy and produced for BBC Radio 4’s Short Works by Michael Shannon, you can listen to the story here on Thursday 26th June 2026 and thereafter on BBC Sounds.
Bernie McGill is the 2023 winner of the prestigious Edge Hill Short Story Prize for her collection This Train is For. 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). Her short stories have been widely anthologised, and her work has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and Radio 4. Bernie was co-judge of the Edge Hill Prize in 2024 and of the Michael McLaverty Short Story Award in 2023. She is a Fellow with the Royal Literary Fund, a Mentor with the Irish Writers’ Centre and an Honorary Member of the Linen Hall Library, where her writing archive is held. Her first short story collection, Sleepwalkers (2013), was re-published in 2025 by No Alibis Press.
