Lucie McKnight Hardy & Jan Carson in conversation

Charming and disarming; the uncanny and the rural; join Jan Carson and Lucie McKnight Hardy in a conversation around writing mystery and suspense in the everyday. 

These are two bestselling authors who create the conditions for that unnerving sense of foreboding that we recognise and love to read, and want to know more about and will be in conversation with Sasha de Buyl. 

Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. She has a novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears and a short story collection, Children’s Children (Liberties Press), two micro-fiction collections, Postcard Stories 1 and 2 (Emma Press) and a short story collection, The Last Resort (Doubleday). Her novel The Fire Starters (Doubleday) won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019, the Kitschies Prize for Speculative Fiction 2020 and was shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize 2020. Jan won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story competition in 2016 and has been shortlisted for the BBC National Story Prize and Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize. She was the inaugural Irish Writers Centre Roaming Writer in Residence on the trains of Ireland in 2019 and the Open Book Scotland Writer in Lockdown during 2020. She is currently writer in residence on an AHRC-funded research project at Queen’s University Belfast exploring the depiction of dementia in contemporary fiction and will be editing a collection of newly commissioned short stories exploring the dementia experience to be published in September 2022. Jan’s third novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in Spring 2022. 

Lucie McKnight Hardy’s stories have featured in various publications, including Best British Short Stories 2019, Black Static, The Lonely Crowd, The New Abject and as a limited edition chapbook from Nightjar Press. Her debut novel, Water Shall Refuse Them, was shortlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition 2017 and longlisted for the Caledonia Novel Award 2018. Her short story collection, Dead Relatives, was published by Dead Ink Books in 2021. Lucie grew up in West Wales and is a Welsh speaker. She has also lived in Liverpool, Cardiff, Zurich and Bradford, and has now settled in the far eastern reaches of Herefordshire, at the foot of the Malvern Hills, where she lives with her husband, three children and other assorted creatures. She has worked in the advertising, public relations and marketing industries, and has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University.

Sasha de Buyl is the Director of Cúirt International Festival of Literature in Galway. She has worked for over ten years as a literature development professional in Scotland and prior to Cúirt, managed Scottish Books International, developing projects and partnerships for Scottish literature overseas. Sasha spent two years working as Literature Officer at Creative Scotland, and has held roles with StAnza International Poetry Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival and Aye Write Book Festival. While at Scottish Book Trust, she managed the programme for Book Week Scotland. She is currently a board member of GAZE: Dublin’s International LGBTQ Film Festival. She regularly moderates events and has previously worked with Edinburgh International Book Festival, Auckland Writers Festival, Wigtown Book Festival and the West Cork Literary Festival, interviewing authors including Colm Toibin, Olivia Laing, Marian Keyes, Gloria Steinem, Eimear McBride and Neil Gaiman.