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 2024, we are delighted to be working with; Neil Hegarty and Mícheál McCann.
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 from Derry City. His poems have appeared in Banshee, The Stinging Fly, The Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options (Dedalus Press, 2023) and have been broadcast on RTÉ and BBC. His first collection, Devotion, is forthcoming with The Gallery Press in 2024.
