Hidden Depths: Writing Male Characters with Garrett Carr & Michael Pedersen

Novelists Garrett Carr and Michael Pedersen both have a gift for writing about men. 

In The Boy from the Sea (Picador, 2025), Garrett navigates father-and-son relationships and the pressures of work in a Donegal fishing town. 

Michael’s novel Muckle Flugga (Faber, 2025) features a lighthouse keeper and his son, whose world is changed by the arrival of a stranger, while his memoir Boy Friends (2022) is an ode to male friendship. 

Join these two brilliant writers for a conversation about masculinity, coastal communities and the hidden depths within us all.

Garrett Carr teaches Creative Writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast, and he is a frequent contributor to The Guardian and The Irish Times. His non-fiction The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland's Border was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week. The Boy from the Sea, his debut novel was published this year and describes the extraordinary effect that a boy abandoned and found on a beach has on an entire community.

Michael Pedersen is a prize-winning poet and author of Boy Friends, which was a Sunday Times Critics Choice and shortlisted for the Saltire Scottish National Book Awards. He was awarded a Robert Louis Stevenson Fellowship and is the current Writer in Residence at the University of Edinburgh, and Edinburgh’s Makar.