Seamus Heaney Centre Fellows: Stacey Gregg, Lisa O’Neill & David Park

Join this year’s Seamus Heaney Centre Fellows Stacey Gregg, Lisa O’Neill and David Park in conversation with the Centre’s director Glenn Patterson. 

All three fellows work across different mediums from Poetry, Fiction, Music, Film and Television. The fellows will share excerpts of work and will engage in a lively and constructive conversation about their practice, where it diverges and where they intersect. 

In association with the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s.

Stacey Gregg is a writer, director and performer for stage and screen. Recent screen work includes Ballywalter, The Baby (Sky/HBO), and Here Beforewhich premiered at SXSW and won Best Film at Galway Film Fleadh. For stage Stacey co-directed Inside Bitch for the Royal Court Theatre, and Clean Break working with women in the criminal justice system, and wrote and performed Hatchet Jinny for Outburst Queer Arts Festival. She has written extensively for television and is currently writing a fourth play for The Abbey Theatre, in development for her second feature film with BBC Film, and writing a limited TV series based on the diaries of Patricia Highsmith. 

Lisa O'Neill is one of the most evocative songwriters in contemporary Irish music today, with five BBC Folk Awards nominations and a designation by the Guardian as Folk Album of the Year in 2019. Lisa's collections include Heard a Long Song Gone (River Lea imprint, 2018), The Wren EP (2019), and an adaptation of Bob Dylan's All the Tired Horses for the final scene of TV drama Peaky Blinders. Her latest album is All Of This Is Chance (Rough Trade, 2023). The album is full of orchestral masterpieces like the ambitious and cinematic Old Note, inspired by Patrick Kavanagh's epic poem The Great Hunger.

David Park is the author of ten novels, a novella and two collections of short stories. His first novel The Healing (Jonathan Cape, 1992) won the Authors' Club First Novel Award. The Truth Commissioner (Bloomsbury, 2008) was awarded the Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize and adapted for film; The Light of Amsterdam (Bloomsbury, 2012) was shortlisted for the IMPAC Prize and The Poets' Wives (Bloomsbury, 2014) was Belfast's One City One Book. He has received a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland and the American Ireland Fund Literary Award. His novel Travelling in a Strange Land won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2018 and was longlisted for The International Dublin Literary Award. His most recent work, Spies in Canaan was runner up in the Gordon Bowker Prize. His work has featured on BBC Radio 4, both as short stories and twice as the Book at Bedtime.

Glenn Patterson is the author of ten novels. His most recent book is Two Summers, a pair of novellas set over two pivotal summers in the lives of two young men from Belfast. He has written plays for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and is the co-writer of Good Vibrations (BBC Films/The Works), an award-winning movie based on the life of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley. He is the Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen's.

Please note, that any income or donation received from ticket sales for this event supports The Crescent Arts Centre and Belfast Book Festival.