An Evening with Joseph O’Connor

Belfast is delighted to welcome one of Ireland’s most acclaimed literary voices, Joseph O’Connor, to a conversation celebrating his latest novel, The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker, 2025) - the gripping second instalment in his critically acclaimed Rome Escape Line Trilogy. 

Inspired by true events and set in Nazi-occupied Rome, The Ghosts of Rome follows Contessa Giovanna Landini, a member of an underground resistance group, as she faces Gestapo chief Paul Hauptmann in a high-stakes game of intrigue and survival.

Joseph will be in conversation with renowned writer Henrietta McKervey. Expect a captivating conversation about history, heroism, and the power of storytelling.

Joseph O’Connor’s fiction has been published in forty languages. His twenty books include eleven novels, among them the million-selling Star of the Sea (American Library Association Award, Irish Post Award for Fiction, France's Prix Millepages, Italy's Premio Acerbi, Prix Madeleine Zepter for European Novel of the Year), Ghost Light (Dublin One City One Book Novel 2011), Shadowplay (Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year) and My Father’s House (Washington Post Book of the Year). He received the 2012 Irish PEN Award for outstanding achievement in literature and in 2014 he was appointed Frank McCourt Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Limerick.

Henrietta McKervey has published four acclaimed novels. Her most recent, A Talented Man, is a psychological suspense about a forged sequel to Bram Stoker’s Dracula. She has a Hennessy First Fiction Award and won the inaugural UCD Maeve Binchy Travel Award while studying for an MFA in Creative Writing. Her Travel Award project, an exploration of the 31 sea areas of the Shipping Forecast, featured on BBC Radio 4. She curates the ECHOES festival and contributes to The Irish Times, Irish Independent and The Brendan O’Connor show on RTÉ Radio 1.