Jan Carson in conversation with Cristín Leach

Join us as we welcome to the Book Festival renowned art critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach who will be in conversation with Northern Ireland best-selling writer Jan Carson.

They will be discussing Cristin's debut book Negative Space which made it to Number 5 Non-Fiction Bestsellers in The Irish Times. Negative Space (Merrion Press, May 2022,) is Leach’s memoir which examines the importance of art and words to help anchor you in a world turned upside down. 

Note - this event was previous Sara Baune and Cristin in conversation. Unfortunately Sara is unable to join us in Belfast but we are excited to welcome Cristín to Belfast who will be chatting with Northern Ireland best-selling writer Jan.

Cristín Leach is The Sunday Times Ireland’s longest-serving art critic. She has written about art for the paper since 2003. She is a writer and broadcaster, whose short fiction and personal essays have been published in Winter Papers and on RTE Radio 1 (Keywords 2020). Her art writing has also appeared in Irish Arts Review, on RTE.ie, in artist catalogues, and in other publications. In 2018, she was shortlisted for Critic of the Year in the Newsbrands Ireland Journalism Awards. 

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.