Festival Associates
Activity at The Crescent and Belfast Book Festival is a collaborative endeavour. Each year, we work with a pool of Freelancers who bring their expertise, ideas and range of perspectives to inform and shape the programme. For 2023, we are delighted to be working with; Natasha Cuddington , Sasha de Buyl , Neil Hegarty and Mícheál McCann .
Natasha Cuddington was born in Saskatchewan. Her translations, essays and reviews have appeared variously. In 2017, she was announced as the recipient of the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary . An assistant editor of Cyphers , her début poetry collection, Each of us (our chronic alphabets) was published by Arlen House in 2018. Together with Ruth Carr, she co-edited the anthology Her Other Language: Northern Irish Women Writers Address Domestic Violence and Abuse (Arlen House: 2020).
Sasha de Buyl is a literature development professional who works nationally and internationally to share the joy of books and reading. They were the Director of Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway from 2019 – 2022 and prior to this managed Scottish Books International , developing projects and partnerships for Scottish literature overseas. Sasha spent two years working as Literature Officer at Creative Scotland , and five years managing reader development projects, including the programme for Book Week Scotland , while at Scottish Book Trust. Over their career, they have held roles with Stanza International Poetry Festival , Edinburgh International Book Festival and Aye Write Book Festival in Glasgow. They are currently Literature and Ideas Programmer at International Literature Festival Dublin and a board member of GAZE : Dublin’s International LGBTQ Film Festival.
Neil Hegarty grew up in Derry. His novels include The Jewel , described by the Irish Times as ‘a vital book for our time’, and Inch Levels , which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year award in 2017. Neil’s non-fiction titles include Frost: That Was the Life That Was, a biography of David Frost; The Secret History of our Streets, which tells the story of twentieth-century London; and The Story of Ireland, which accompanies the BBC television history of Ireland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Dublin Review , Stinging Fly , Tangerine and elsewhere; he is a regular literary reviewer with the Irish Times ; and is co-editor with Nora Hickey M’Sichili of the essay collection Impermanence , published by No Alibis and recently adapted for radio by RTÉ . Neil lives in Dublin.
Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review , The Stinging Fly and Poetry Ireland Review . He has published pamphlets of poems, most recently Waking Light (Skein Press) and Keeper (14publishing). He was a co-editor of Hold Open the Door (UCD Press), Trumpet (Poetry Ireland) and is a founder and editor of Outburst Arts’ catflap magazine. He lives in Belfast where he is completing a PhD in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.