Join this year’s Seamus Heaney Centre fellows in conversation with the Centre’s Director Glenn Patterson.

Known for her witty and intelligent prose, Caoilinn Hughes’s latest novel, The Alternatives, tells the story of four sisters who reconnect when the eldest disappears into the Irish countryside. 

Love or its absence dominates the intimate songs on the new album from ARBORIST, the moniker of Belfast-based musician Mark McCambridge. 

Playwright and screenwriter Conor McPherson’s work includes the 1997 play The Weir, a profoundly moving Irish pub drama, which recently returned to the stage starring Brendan Gleeson.

Meet the panel

Caoilinn Hughes’s latest novel is The Alternatives, a New York Times Editor’s Choice. Her second novel, The Wild Laughter won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award, and her debut Orchid & the Wasp won the Collyer Bristow Prize. Her short stories have won the Irish Book Awards’ Story of the Year, The Moth Story Prize, and an O.Henry Prize. She was recently Oscar Wilde Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin and a Cullman Center Fellow at New York Public Library.

Belfast-based Mark McCambridge has been releasing music under the name ARBORIST for close to a decade. Over 3 critically acclaimed albums - The Guardian (“instant classic. ★★★★” ) MOJO (“...devastatingly bleak...upliftingly beautiful. ★★★★”)  - he has recorded with the likes of Kim Deal, Matthew E White and Bill Drummond, and shared stages with Cat Power, Echo & The Bunnymen and Low. He has also composed music for film, tv and radio. 2026 will see the release of his much anticipated 4th LP. 

Conor McPherson was born in Dublin and attended University College Dublin where he began to write and direct. His plays include The Weir, Girl from the North Country (with Bob Dylan), The Seafarer, The Night Alive, Shining City, The Brightening Air, Port Authority, This Lime Tree Bower, St Nicholas, Rum & Vodka and The Good Thief. Stage adaptations include Uncle Vanya by Anton Chekhov, The Dance of Death by August Strindberg, The Birds by Daphne Du Maurier, Cold War by Paweł Pawlikowski (with Elvis Costello) and The Nest by Franz Xaver Kroetz. Awards for his work include The Laurence Olivier Award, Evening Standard Award, New York Critics Circle Award, South Bank Sky Arts Award, London Critics Circle Award, George Devine Award and five Tony Award nominations.