Belfast Invites: Dawn Watson & Martina Evans

Belfast Invites: a mini-series in which Belfast-based writers are asked who they’d like to be in conversation with.

Come along and join Dawn Watson and Martina Evans in conversation with Mícheál McCann discussing their recent publications. 

Dawn’s much-acclaimed poem-story collection, We Play Here, imagines 1980s North Belfast through the eyes of four teenage girls and explores class, gender, queer identity, family dynamics, and youth culture in the 80s. 

Martina’s The Coming Thing immerses the reader in the challenging 1980s world of Cork City where tensions unfold. The poem looks hard at the duplicity surrounding received ideas about the sacredness of human life and how economic change runs counter to the values of 'old' Ireland. 

Dawn Watson is a selected writer for our Festival Reading Group in May.  Please join poet Shakeema Edwards for conversations on We Play Here at The Crescent on dates in May, before joining us at the Festival event. See here for more information. Click here for more information.

Dawn Watson is from Belfast. Her debut collection We Play Here (Granta Poetry, 2023) was a Guardian Poetry Book of the Year 2023 and was shortlisted for the John Pollard International Poetry Prize for an outstanding debut. Her pamphlet The Stack of Owls is Getting Higher is published by The Emma Press (2019). Dawn is a lecturer in creative writing at Queen’s University.

Martina Evans is the author of thirteen books of poetry and prose. American Mules (Carcanet, 2021) won the Pigott Poetry Prize in 2022. Her latest narrative poem, The Coming Thing (Carcanet, 2023) was a TLS Book of the Year. She is an Irish Times poetry critic.

Mícheál McCann is from Derry City. His poems have appeared in Banshee, The Stinging Fly, The Poetry Review and Poetry Ireland Review, anthologized in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options (Dedalus Press, 2023) and have been broadcast on RTÉ and BBC. His first collection, Devotion, is forthcoming with The Gallery Press in 2024.