An evening with the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellows

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

Poet Fiona Benson’s collections – including Vertigo & Ghost and Midden Witch – have won the Forward Prize and the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize.

Belfast-based writer Jan Carson’s novels include The Fire Starters, winner of the EU Prize for Literature, and The Raptures, shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year.

Screenwriters Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson’s work includes Blue Lights, the hit TV show about response police officers in Belfast.

Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. She has published three novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022 and was subsequently shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday (UK) in April 2024 and Scribner (US) in July 2024. Her writing has been aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE. She is the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast 2025 and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her first stage play, an adaptation of the children’s classic, The Velveteen Rabbit, was produced by Replay Theatre Company at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast in 2025. Her next novel, Few and Far Between, is forthcoming in early 2026.

​​Fiona Benson is the author of four poetry collections: Bright Travellers, Vertigo & Ghost, Ephemeron and Midden Witch (Jonathan Cape, May 2025). All three of her published collections have been shortlisted for the T S Eliot prize, and her books have won the Forward Prize, the Seamus Heaney First Collection Prize, the Roehampton Poetry Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Currently, Infamous Offspring, a collaboration with the Belgian choreographer Wim Vandekeybus, is in production across Europe with the company Ultima Vez. In 2024 she received a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors. She lives in mid-Devon with her husband and their two daughters.

Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson met while working for the BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Panorama. They spent a decade making investigative documentaries, both in the UK and around the world, before moving into drama. They are inspired by the capacity of television drama and film to tell authentic stories about how the modern world really works. Their work is typically the product of long periods of direct journalistic research into their subject matter.

In 2020, Adam and Declan were selected by Screen International as Screenstars of Tomorrow. The duo wrote hit drama The Salisbury Poisonings, which became the BBC’s most watched drama of 2020 and was subsequently acquired by Netflix for the rest of the world. They then released their first feature-length film Rogue Agent (FREEGARD), starring James Norton and Gemma Arterton, on UK Netflix and theatres across the US in summer 2022. Declan and Adam are currently working on series 3 and 4 of their original scripted drama Blue Lights, about response police officers in Belfast. The show has garnered a number of accolades and has been distributed across the globe. They have recently established their production company, Hot Sauce Pictures, in Belfast.