Lucy Caldwell's Patrons Pick: Writing Motherhood

Join Lucy Caldwell, Belfast Book Festival Patron, in conversation with Claire Lynch (Small, On Motherhoods, Hachette 2021) and Jessica Cornwell (Birth Notes, A Memoir of Recovery, Virago May 2022), in a conversation on writing motherhood and telling women’s stories.

Claire Lynch’s dazzling debut begins with the smallest of life’s substances, the microscopic cells subdividing in a petri dish in a fertility treatment centre. Jessica Cornwell’s Birth Notes is the story – luminous, breathtaking and courageous – of forging a self from fragments following the birth of her first children, twin boys. 

Claire Lynch is a professor of English and Irish Literature at Brunel University London. Small, a literary memoir of motherhood, is her first book for a general audience. Claire’s personal essays have appeared on BBC Radio 4 and in the Washington Post. She lives near Windsor with her wife, three daughters, and an ever-increasing number of pets.

Jessica Cornwell is a writer living in Somerset. Born in California, she studied at Stanford and the Institute of Theatre in Barcelona before moving to London to work in film. Her first novel, The Serpent Papers, was published in 2015 to great acclaim. In 2018 she became the mother to twin boys. Birth Notes is her first work of non-fiction. 

Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, including These Days (Faber, March 2022), two short story collections, Multitudes and Intimacies, and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short stories. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for her story All the People Were Mean and Bad.