In the good seats: Michael Magee, Susannah Dickey & Darran Anderson

Get the good seats for this conversation with Irish writers Darran Anderson, Susannah Dickey and Michael Magee, contributors to a dazzling new collection of essays on film and cinema.

From childhood films on the big screen to awkward first dates, from threadbare seats to the click and whirr of the projector, In the good seats (Paper Visual Art, 2025) captures the particular magic of the cinema.

Join Darran, Susannah and Michael as they share the moments when their lives were touched by film.

Darran Anderson is the author of Inventory, Imaginary Cities, and the forthcoming book on empire In the Lands of My Enemy. He writes primarily on the themes of cities, the future, emerging technologies, the relationship between politics and culture, and legacies of conflict and division. He's worked on urban projects across Europe and Asia, has given talks at the likes of the Venice Biennale, Oxford University and the V&A, and is a recipient of a Windham Campbell Non-Fiction Award from Yale University. He is Derry-born and London-based. 

Susannah Dickey is a writer from Derry. Her debut poetry collection, ISDAL, was published in 2023 by Picador. It won the inaugural PEN Heaney Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the John Pollard Prize, and was an Irish Times and The Guardian Book of the Year. Her third novel will be published in 2026 by Bloomsbury. 

Michael Magee is the fiction editor of the Tangerine and a graduate of the creative writing PhD programme at Queen’s University, Belfast. His writing has appeared in Winter Papers, The Stinging Fly, The Lifeboat and The 32: The Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices. Close to Home is his first novel. It was shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize 2023 and won the Rooney Prize for Literature 2023.