Prof. Eve Patten

Prof. Eve Patten is Director of the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute in Trinity College, Dublin.

Her research covers nineteenth and twentieth-century Irish literary studies, twentieth-century British fiction and cultural history, and the literature of war.  Recent publications related to Irish writing include a monograph, Ireland, Revolution and the English Modernist Imagination (Oxford UP, 2022), and as editor, Irish Literature in Transition, 1940–1980 (Cambridge UP, 2020). Since publishing her first book, Samuel Ferguson and the Culture of Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Four Courts, 2004) she has written frequently on civic institutions, reading communities, and the professional middle class in Victorian Dublin. She has also published widely on modern and contemporary Irish fiction, including most recently ‘The Irish Novelist as Critic and Anthologist’, for the Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Fiction (2020), and (with Paul Delaney) a co-edited volume of short stories, Dublin Tales, which came out in Oxford UP in 2023.

Prof. Patten is also interested in writing that crosses Irish, British, and European identities in the long twentieth century. Her monograph Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning’s Fictions of War was published in 2011. She has co-edited Literatures of War (2008), proceedings of the International Lawrence Durrell School of Corfu, and a volume of essays on Irish cultural and literary connections to Central and Eastern Europe, Ireland, West to East (2014).  She is now researching a book on the twentieth-century novelist, political activist and travel writer Ethel Mannin, based on her correspondence with contemporaries including W.B. Yeats, Bertrand Russell, Herbert Read and Emma Goldman.

Dr Alice Lyons

Alice Lyons is a writer whose work embraces the visual arts.

Author of three books of poetry, and the novel Oona (Liliput Press, 2020), she is recipient of the Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry and the inaugural Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary awarded by Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill. Her poetry film, The Polish Language, co-directed with Orla Mc Hardy, was nominated for an Irish Film and Television Award (IFTA, 2010). Originally from the USA, where she was Radcliffe Fellow in Poetry and New Media at Harvard University 2015/16, she has lived in the west of Ireland for over twenty years. She lectures in writing and literature at the Yeats Academy of Arts, Design & Architecture, IT Sligo.

H. E. Patrick Haughey

Patrick Haughey grew up in Omagh in Northern Ireland. He studied Economics and Management at Oxford, then joined the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

Patrick’s first posting was to the British Embassy in Moscow, where he served as Second Secretary covering economic and energy issues, before being promoted to head of the Economic section. Patrick was then posted to the British Embassy in Paris as First Secretary Political (2011-2015), covering foreign policy issues.

From 2015-2018, Patrick was head of the Political Section in the British Embassy in Tel Aviv, covering Israel-UK bilateral cooperation, regional issues, and the Middle East Peace Process.

Patrick joined Ireland’s Department of Foreign Affairs in 2018. As Director of Ireland’s Humanitarian Unit, he managed Ireland’s humanitarian aid budget of around €100 million annually, as well as response to breaking humanitarian crises.

From 2020-2022 Patrick was Director of the Gulf and Middle East Unit. This coincided with Ireland’s position as a non-permanent member of the UN Security Council. In this role, Patrick oversaw successful negotiations on two UN Security Council Resolutions to extend the mandate for cross-border humanitarian aid to Syria, as well as Ireland’s role as Facilitator on the Security Council for the Iranian nuclear deal.

Patrick is married and has two young boys. He speaks French and Russian and is learning Polish.

Evelyn Conlon

Evelyn Conlon is a short story writer, novelist and essayist, widely translated, most recently into Tamil, Chinese and Greek.

She has written four novels, four collections of short stories and is the editor/co-editor of four anthologies including Cutting the Night in Two and Later On. She has been writer-in-residence in many places at home and internationally, and is Adjunct Professor with Carlow University, Pittsburgh, MFA. Her last short story collection, Moving About the Place, 2021, was followed by Reading Rites: Books, writing and other things that matter, 2023, a collection of essays on the life. Telling Truths, a collection on her work, was edited by Teresa Caneda-Cabrera, published by Peter Lang, 2023.

More details on

www.evelynconlon.com

Sean O’ Reilly

From Derry in Northern Ireland, Sean O’ Reilly is an acclaimed novelist and short story writer, the author of Curfew and Other Stories, and Love and Sleep.

His most recent book is the short story collection, Levitation. As a teacher, he leads an innovative writing workshop in association with the Stinging Fly literary magazine. He is a member of Aosdána.