Thursday, 16th October

Festival Pass (all events) | €50

Claire-Lise Kieffer & Vanessa Onwuemezi

2.30pm, Cork City Library | Free, unticketed

Claire-Lise Kieffer has fiction published in Irish and international magazines. She received two Arts Council grants and published her first book, Tenterhooks, in 2025. She now lives in Paris with her best friend and their cat.

Buy Tenterhooks (Banshee Press).

“Kieffer’s stories are propulsive and barbed and sleekly written. Like a cracked mirror, her writing brilliantly reflects modern life and modern relationships with a shade of exquisite uncanniness.” — John Patrick McHugh

Vanessa Onwuemezi lives in London. She was the winner of The White Review Short Story Prize 2019 and her work has appeared in literary and art magazines, including Granta, Frieze and Art Review. Her debut short story collection, Dark Neighbourhood, was published by Fitzcarraldo Editions in 2021, and was named one of The Guardian’s best books of 2021. It was shortlisted for both the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize in 2022 and her short story ‘Green Afternoon’ was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award 2022.

Buy Dark Neighbourhood (Fitzcarraldo Editions) and visit the author's Insta.

“Struggling to realize the human ideals of love and freedom, the characters of Dark Neighbourhood roam instead the depths of alienation, loss and shame. With a detached eye and hallucinatory vision, they observe the worlds around them as the line between dream and reality dissolves and they themselves begin to fragment.” — Justine Jordan

(Moderator) Beverly Parayno’s debut short story collection WILDFLOWERS (PAWA Press, 2023) was shortlisted for the 43rd Annual Northern California Book Award in Fiction, winner of a 2024 IPPY Bronze Medal and 2024 National Indie Excellence Award in AAPI Fiction. She lives in the Sierra Nevada foothills of Northern California, where she co-facilitates the Cameron Park Library Writers Workshop.

Rosemary Jenkinson & Kirsty Logan

4.00pm, Cork City Library | Free, unticketed

Rosemary Jenkinson is a poet, writer and up-all-nighter. Her short story collections are Contemporary Problems Nos. 53 & 54, Aphrodite’s Kiss, Catholic Boy (EU Prize for Literature shortlist), Lifestyle Choice 10mgs (Edge Hill Prize shortlist), Marching Season and Love in the Time of Chaos (Edge Hill Prize shortlist). Her latest, Laganside Lights, was published in 2025 by Arlen House. The Irish Times has praised her fiction for ‘an elegant wit, terrific characterization and an absolute sense of her own particular Belfast’. She is an Arts Council Major Artist and Royal Literary Fund fellow at Queen’s University.

Buy Laganside Light (Arlen House).

“Sizzling with wit, insight and her own sly, subversive understanding of sexuality, Rosemary Jenkinson is a born disruptor, a writer afraid of nothing … Read at your peril, savour the danger.” — Mia Gallagher

Kirsty Logan’s latest books are the story collection No & Other Love Stories and the memoir The Unfamiliar: A Queer Motherhood Memoir. She is also the author of three novels, three story collections, two chapbooks, a 10-hour audio play for Audible, several collaborative projects with musicians and visual artists, and around 300 short stories. Her books have won the Lambda, Polari, Saboteur, Scott and Gavin Wallace awards. Her work has been optioned for TV, developed for film, adapted for stage, recorded for radio and podcasts, exhibited in galleries and distributed from a vintage Wurlitzer cigarette machine.

Buy No & Other Love Stories (Penguin) and visit the author's website.

“No one writes about the horrific and the erotic, and the tangled-up intersections of both, like Kirsty Logan. This book will make you sweat.” — Anna Bogutskaya

(Moderator) Clíona Ní Ríordáin is a critic and translator who teaches at the University of Notre Dame. Recent publications are English Language Poets in University College Cork 1970-1980 (Palgrave, 2020), and Francis Bacon’s Nanny, the final volume of Maylis Besserie’s Irish trilogy (Lilliput, 2024). The first, Yell, Sam, If You Still Can, was runner up for the 2023 Scott Moncrieff Award.

Lisa Moore & Shane Tivenan

7.30pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Lisa Moore is the author of the bestselling novels Alligator, February, and Caught; the short story collections Open and Something for Everyone; and the young adult novel, Flannery. She has won the Commonwealth Fiction Prize, CBC’s Canada Reads, and the Writers’ Trust Engel Findley Award and received nominations for the Man Booker Prize, the Giller Prize, and the Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize. Moore’s third novel, Caught, was adapted into a CBC television series. She lives in St. John’s, Canada.

Visit the author's webpage.

“Moore’s every word, every sentence, every detail, is a tiny snowflake; perfectly shaped and unique. Together, they make a storm so strong it can shut down a whole province … Each scene crystallizes in gritty, lucid prose.” — Katherine Fawcett

Shane Tivenan grew up close to Athlone Town, County Roscommon. He studied Cultural Anthropology at Maynooth University. His fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The London Magazine, Prototype, and has been broadcast on RTÉ Radio 1. He was awarded the 2020 RTÉ Francis MacManus Prize and the 2024 John McGahern Award. His collection of short stories To Avenge a Dead Glacier has been described by The Irish Times as a ‘vital and visionary debut’.

Buy To Avenge a Dead Glacier (The Lilliput Press).

“There is a psychedelic brilliance to the way Shane Tivenan harnesses language. Paragraph after paragraph thrums with sound, buzzes with energy, delights with beauty. These stories straddle worlds: ancient and digital, human and animal, bog and sky; they sing with freshness and daring.” — Danielle McLaughlin

(Moderator) Laura Cassidy is a writer from Co. Kildare, living in Cork City. She is a co-founder and contributing editor of Banshee and reviews books for The Irish Examiner. Laura is a recipient of the Cecil Day-Lewis Literary Bursary Award along with several awards from the Arts Council. Her short fiction recently appeared in The Pig’s Back literary journal.

Peter Bradshaw & Paul McVeigh

9.00pm, Cork Arts Theatre | €5

Peter Bradshaw is an author and critic who has been chief film critic for The Guardian since 1999 and is also contributing editor of Esquire UK. His most recent publication is The Body In the Mobile Library and Other Stories and in addition he has written three novels and an edited selection of his Guardian reviews entitled The Films That Made Me. He also writes for radio and television and is currently co-writing a drama-thriller for Channel Four TV entitled I Am Not Alice Bell. He lives in London with his wife and son.

Buy The Body in the Mobile Library (Lightning Books).

“Bradshaw relishes the grotesque and improbable; his set-ups are outrageously inventive … Characters are sympathetically drawn and their longings, insecurities, vanities and weaknesses feel all too credible.” — Emma Beddington

Paul McVeigh's short stories have been in numerous anthologies including Being Various, The Art of the Glimpse and Common People. They have also appeared in The London Magazine, The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, on BBC Radio 3, 4, 5, RTÉ Radio 1, and Sky ARTS. His ten-part short story series, The Circus, aired on BBC Radio 4 in 2023 and was repeated on BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio Foyle. His debut collection of radio stories, I Hear You, was published by Salt in March 2025. Paul co-founded the London Short Story Festival and was associate director of Word Factory, described by The Guardian as ‘the UK’s national organisation for excellence in the short story.’

Visit the author's website.

“This is a world of escape artists and fraudsters, of body swaps and comedy cuckoos, of misfits and trespassers of every ilk … where else would you want to be than amongst the outliers, where the tender, the vulnerable and the brave reside?” — Bernie McGill

(Moderator) Patrick Holloway’s debut novel, The Language of Remembering, is published by Epoque Press (2025). He is the winner of the Bath Short Story Award, The Allingham Fiction Prize, The Flash 500 Prize and The Molly Keane Creative Writing Prize. He is an editor of the literary journal The Four Faced Liar.

Image credits: Vanessa Onwuemezi photographed by Paul Macguire, Kirsty Logan photographed by Simone Falk, Paul McVeigh photographed by Chad Alexander