Join us for a genre-bending discussion about writing across different forms, chaired by poet Paul Maddern.

Following acclaimed novels, short stories and memoir, Tim MacGabhann’s breathtaking poetry collection, Found in a Context of Destruction, journeys from Ireland to Mexico, navigating addiction, recovery and love. 

In her new memoir, Among Communists, Forward Prize-winning poet Sinéad Morrissey tells a unique history of the Troubles while charting a young writer’s journey into poetry. 

Told as a novel-in-verse, Filly is an exquisitely written story of intergenerational love, trauma and queer joy from award-winning poet Rosamund Taylor. 

Meet the panelists

Tim MacGabhann is the author of the novels Call Him Mine and How to Be Nowhere, the memoir The Black Pool, the short story collection Saints, and the poetry collection Found in a Context of Destruction.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in Northern Ireland in 1972 and educated at Trinity College, Dublin. She has published six collections with Carcanet as well as a selected poems, Found Architecture (2020). Her awards include a Lannan Literary Fellowship (2007), First Prize in the UK National Poetry Competition (2007), the Irish Times Award (2009, 2013) and the T S Eliot Prize for her fifth collection, Parallax, in 2013. In 2016 she received the E M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Her latest collection, On Balance (2017) was awarded the Forward Prize and was a Poetry Book Society Choice. In 2020 Sinéad was named the European Poet of Freedom by the City of Gdansk, Poland and in 2024 she was the recipient of the Seamus Heaney Award (Japan). She has served as Belfast Poet Laureate and in 2019 was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She is currently Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University. Sinéad Morrissey is a frequent contributor to PN Review. Among Communists is her first memoir, published by Carcanet in March 2026. 

Rosamund Taylor’s debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection and for the Yeats Society Poetry Prize. She published two books in 2025: Reflections Glimmer: Poems Exploring Ekphrasis (Tapsalteerie) and Filly (Banshee Press).  Her work has been included in anthologies, such as He She They Us (PanMacmillan 2024), Windfall: Irish Nature Poems (2023), and Queering the Green (2021). Her individual poems have won The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Poetry Prize (2025), The Telegraph Poetry Prize (2023), and The London Magazine Poetry Prize (2020), and in 2017, a selection of her poetry won the Maírtín Crawford Award.

Paul Maddern has four publications with Templar Poetry, the latest being The Tipping Line, and he edited Queering the Green: Post-2000 Queer Irish Poetry (Lifeboat Press). He has received three Bermuda Government Literary Awards and was a 2023 Writing Fellow at the James Merrill House, CT. His poem, Effacé, is on the Northern Irish GCSE syllabus.