Belfast Invites: Jan Carson & Sophie White

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

Join Jan Carson and Sophie White to discuss Jan’s short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses (Penguin, 2024) - a surreal and darkly comic collection that offers a fresh and irreverent look at life in contemporary Northern Ireland. 

Sophie’s work has been described as “exquisite and disturbing, brutish and beautifully crafted”. 

We predict an irreverent conversation mulling a shared fascination with the uncanny; feminist horror and much more in between! 

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator 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 We Still Have Horses was published by Doubleday in April 2024.

Sophie White is a novelist, essayist and podcaster from Dublin. She also holds a First-Class Honours degree in Sculpture from NCAD. She is the author of seven books. Her first four books, Recipes for a Nervous Breakdown (Gill 2016), Filter This (Hachette, 2019), Unfiltered (Hachette, 2020) and The Snag List (Hachette, 2022) have all been bestsellers and award nominees. Her fifth book, the bestselling memoir Corpsing (Tramp Press, 2021), was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Michel Déon Prize for non-fiction. Her sixth book, Where I End (Tramp Press, 2022) was described as “brilliantly visceral”  by the Guardian and “exquisite and disturbing, brutish and beautifully crafted” by The Irish Times. It won the Shirley Jackson Award for best novel. Her seventh book and fifth novel, My Hot Friend (Hachette, 2023) won the An Post Irish book Award for Popular Fiction. Sophie writes a weekly column Nobody Tells You for the Sunday Independent LIFE magazine and her journalism has been nominated for numerous media awards. TV adaptations of her first two books are in development and she co-hosts the chart-topping comedy podcasts, Mother of Pod and The Creep Dive.