An Evening with Tessa Hadley: Hosted by Lucy Caldwell

Join Tessa Hadley and Lucy Caldwell for a conversation about fiction, the writing life and the pleasures of reading. 

Tessa’s most recent book, The Party (Vintage, 2024) is a coming-of-age story set in post-war Bristol. At a dockside pub, sisters Moira and Evelyn meet two men, Paul and Sinden, whose air of sophistication both intrigues and repels them. Through ever-changing desires and sudden revelations, the sisters learn shocking things about themselves and each other, releasing them into a new phase of their lives. 

Tessa Hadley has published eight novels - including The Past, Late in the Day, and Free Love - and four collections of short stories; her latest collection, After the Funeral, came out in paperback in July 2024 and her novella, The Party, was published in October 2024. She has short stories regularly in The New Yorker, and reviews for The Guardian and the London Review of Books; she was awarded a Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction and the Hawthornden Prize in 2016, and the Edge Hill Prize in 2018. 

Lucy Caldwell, a patron of the Belfast Book Festival, is the author of four novels, including These Days, two short story collections, Multitudes and Intimacies, and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for her story All the People Were Mean and Bad.