RTÉ Sunday Miscellany: Live at Belfast Book Festival

This June, join us for a special Belfast edition of the popular, long-running RTÉ Radio 1 programme.

Recorded live at The Crescent, this will be a rare, special recording with guests including Wendy Erskine, Neil Hegarty, Mícheál McCann, Cherry Smyth and John Toal. A magical mix of spoken word and live music. Since 1968, Sunday Miscellany has been a weekend institution on Irish radio, broadcasting a magical mix of spoken word and music on RTÉ Radio One each Sunday morning. Produced by Sarah Binchy.

Wendy Erskine is a Belfast-based writer. Her debut short story collection, Sweet Home, was published by The Stinging Fly Press and Picador. It was shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize and The Edge Hill Prize, and was longlisted for The Gordon Burn Prize. It won the Butler Literary Prize and was optioned for TV. Her second collection, Dance Move, was published in February 2022 by Stinging Fly and Picador. 

Neil Hegarty grew up in Derry. His novels include The Jewel, described by the Irish Times as ‘a vital book for our time’, and Inch Levels, which was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Novel of the Year award in 2017. Neil’s non-fiction titles include Frost: That Was the Life That Was, a biography of David Frost; The Secret History of our Streets, which tells the story of twentieth-century London; and The Story of Ireland, which accompanies the BBC television history of Ireland. His essays and short fiction have appeared in the Dublin Review, Stinging Fly, Tangerine and elsewhere; he is a regular literary reviewer with the Irish Times; and is co-editor with Nora Hickey M’Sichili of the essay collection Impermanence, published by No Alibis and recently adapted for radio by RTE. Neil lives in Dublin.

Mícheál McCann is a poet from Derry. His poems have appeared in The Poetry Review, The Stinging Fly and Poetry Ireland Review. He has published pamphlets of poems, most recently Waking Light (Skein Press) and Keeper (14publishing). He was a co-editor of Hold Open the Door (UCD Press), Trumpet (Poetry Ireland) and is a founder and editor of Outburst Arts’ catflap magazine. He lives in Belfast where he is completing a PhD in the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.

Cherry Smyth is an Irish writer, living in London who has written the following poetry collections; When the Lights Go Up, One Wanted Thing, Test, Orange and Famished. Famished tours as a performance in collaboration with vocalist Lauren Kinsella and composer Ed Bennett. Cherry was nominated as a Fellow for the Royal Society of Literature in 2022 and is also a Hawthornden Fellow. She is Associate Professor in Creative and Critical Writing at the University of Greenwich.

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