Irish writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa explores how the past makes itself felt within the present. 

Following the award-winning A Ghost in the Throat, Said the Dead traces a woman’s obsession with a derelict Victorian mental hospital in Cork that’s being converted into modern apartments. 

Guided by an irresistible impulse, the woman starts trespassing, stealing and absconding from her family duties, uncovering a chorus of haunting voices: those of the women who knew the hospital best.

Join Doireann in conversation with poet Mícheál McCann to discuss history, ghost stories and her genre-bending prose. 

Meet the writers

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is an Irish writer. Her most recent book, A Ghost in the Throat , won the James Tait Black Prize and the An Post Book of the Year award and was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize. She is also the author of seven critically acclaimed books of poetry. 

Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry City. He has published two pamphlets of poems, and most recently a collection, Devotion, with The Gallery Press in 2024. Devotion was Highly Commended in the Forward Prizes for Poetry 2024 and named a book of the year by RTÉ and The Irish Times. He is a poetry critic for The Irish Times, and he lives and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast.