Join us for a celebration of exciting new voices from Cork, as four outstanding debut novelists share their journeys into fiction.

Catherine Airey grew up in England in a family of mixed English-Irish descent and studied at the University of Cambridge. She is one of the Observer’s Best New Novelists for 2025 and shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize. Confessions is her first novel.

Louise Hegarty’s stories have appeared in Banshee, The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and The Dublin Review, and have been featured on BBC Radio 4. Fair Play is her first novel.

Patrick Holloway is the winner of the Bath Short Story Award, the Molly Keane Creative Writing Prize, the Flash 500 Prize, and the Allingham Fiction contest, and he was the recipient of the Paul McVeigh Residency in 2023. His work has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, Poetry Ireland, The Moth, Southword, the Ilanot Review, Carve, the Irish Times and the Irish Independent. The Language of Remembering is his first novel.

Barbara Leahy is a prizewinner in the RTÉ Francis MacManus short story competition, with stories broadcast on RTÉ radio and published in the Bridport Prize Anthology and the Bristol Prize anthology. In 2017, she won the RTÉ Guide/Penguin Ireland short story competition. Barbara was a joint winner of the Irish Writers’ Centre Novel Fair in 2023. Rembrandt’s Promise is her first novel.

Mairéad Hearne, literary blogger and champion of Irish writing, will lead the conversation.