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. 

Chaired by editor and writer Emma Warnock, this conversation will explore 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.

Emma Warnock is an editor and writer. Her fiction has been published by The Stinging Fly. She is currently supported by the Arts Council of Northern Ireland through the SIAP programme.