Motherhood, Love & Identity: Pallavi Padma-Uday & Catherine Dunne

We are delighted to welcome to the festival Pallavi Padma-Uday and Catherine Dunne to discuss their recent works. 

Pallavi’s newly published collection Lola in Belfast offers poems on love, longing, assimilation and identity. Catherine’s new novel A Good Enough Mother explores the experience of motherhood in Ireland from the women incarcerated in mother and baby homes to the challenges of motherhood in the present day. 

Join us for a conversation on motherhood, love and identity.

Pallavi Padma-Uday is a writer, journalist and business historian. Her first collection of poetry, Orisons in the Dark, was published in April 2023 by India’s eminent publisher of poetry, Writers Workshop. Recipient of several bursaries and awards from the Arts Council of Ireland and the Irish Writers Centre, Pallavi has read at various events including the Rostrevor Literature Festival and the Northern Soul Road Show. Her writing has featured in several literary journals and anthologies in India and the U.K. She was an Economic History scholar at London School of Economics. Her second poetry collection, Lola in Belfast, is forthcoming later this year.

Catherine Dunne is the author of twelve published novels, several essays and one work of non-fiction. An Unconsidered People documents the lived experience of some half a million Irish immigrants to Britain in the dismal years of the 1950s. Catherine’s novels have been shortlisted for a number of prizes, including Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the International Strega Prize. The Things We Know Now won the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 and The Years That Followed, published in 2016, was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. Her latest novel, A Good Enough Mother, won the European Rapallo Prize for fiction in November 2023, and will be published in English by Betimes Books in June 2024. Her work has been translated into several languages. She was the recipient of the 2018 Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.