Sin Blaché & Cathy Sweeney: The Real Thing

We are delighted to present two thrillers, perhaps not quite as you might expect, who will be chatting with Hilary McCollum about their work. 

Prophet, co-authored by Sin Blaché (Jonathan Cape, 2023),  is an unputdownable, fast-paced, page-turner of a novel. According to Neil Gaiman ‘It’s present day science fiction that feels like the best sort of spy novel with real people you can care about’. 

Breakdown (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2024), by Cathy Sweeney is a novel about the rage and reckoning of a middle aged, educated woman who has lived her life in accordance with the expectations of society. Mothers are not supposed to go on road trips’. 

Both Prophet and Breakdown dwell - in very different ways - on the power of the past, and ironise nostalgia; in Prophet, it's weaponised to kill; and in Breakdown, it's stripped away to present actual truths.

​​Sin Blaché is an author and musician. They have been writing horror and sci-fi stories all their life. Prophet is their first novel. Born in California, they live in the Northwest of Ireland and can be found obsessing over obscure folk instruments, being an ambivalent saviour to feral cats, and playing too many video games. Prophet is co-authored with Helen Macdonald, a writer, poet, naturalist and historian of science. Their books include H is for Hawk, which won many prizes including the Costa Book of the Year and the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction, and the Sunday Times bestselling Vesper Flights. They live in Suffolk with their two parrots.

Cathy Sweeney lives in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College and taught English at secondary level for many years before turning to writing. Her work has been published in various magazines and journals.

Hilary McCollum writes fiction, non-fiction and drama. Her first novel, Golddigger, won the Golden Crown Literary Society Prize for historical fiction in 2016. Her memoir, Funny Peculiar, was published under the name Constance McCullagh. She has written four plays about LGBT lives. She completed a PhD in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre in 2021.