Join us for readings and conversation about the new Paper Visual Arts anthology As if nothing could fall: Essays on monuments, a compilation of encounters with monuments of all shapes and sizes – from distant vistas to epic megastructures and fleeting memorials. 

Writers Neil Hegarty and Belinda McKeon will discuss with Maureen Boyle their contributions to the anthology, reflecting on the ways we imbue objects with memory. 

About the writers

Neil Hegarty’s novels include The Jewel and Inch Levels, which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year award. Neil’s non-fiction titles include the biography Frost: That Was the Life That Was, and The Story of Ireland, which accompanies the RTE-BBC television history of Ireland. His short fiction and essays have appeared in the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Cyphers, Tangerine, and elsewhere; and he is co-editor of the essay collection Impermanence, which has been adapted for radio by RTE. He is a regular literary reviewer on the Irish Times.

Belinda McKeon is the author of the novels Solace (2011) and Tender (2015). She directs the MA in Creative Writing at Maynooth University. 

Maureen Boyle is a writer, teacher and editor, originally from Sion Mills in Tyrone but now living in Belfast.  She studied in Trinity, Dublin; University of East Anglia and has Masters from UU and Queens. She has published two collections of poetry, the most recent The Last Spring of the World, with Arlen House in 2022 as well as a single illustrated poem, Strabane in 2018.  She has won various awards including the Strokestown International Poetry Prize, the Ireland Chair of Poetry’s Poetry Prize and Inaugural Travel Bursary and the Fish Short Memoir Prize, as well as Individual Arts, ACEs and Travel awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland.  She taught Creative Writing with the Open University for ten years and English in St Dominic’s Grammar School in Belfast.  She is a poetry and memoir mentor for the Irish Writers’ Centre and teaches ekphrasis in Open Learning in QUB.