The Architecture of Love

Fresh from the triumph of a Novel of the Year award for Midwinter Break, Bernard MacLaverty returns to his native Belfast to close out the city's Book Festival. Joining him are his daughter, the poet Ciara MacLaverty, whose latest collection is about 'the places love takes us', and the Hennessy Award-winning poet David Cameron,  'one of the most insightful and thought-provoking poets around' (Sunday Herald). And the architecture of love is explored in music, too, with a set from Kurt Cobain's favourite songwriter, Eugene Kelly.

Bernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast but now lives in Glasgow. He has written five books of short stories (most of which are in his Collected Short Stories) and five novels – Lamb, Cal, Grace Notes (shortlisted for the Booker Prize), The Anatomy School and Midwinter Break. The last of these, featuring a retired architect and his wife holidaying in Amsterdam as their marriage founders, won Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards (2017). He has written versions of his fiction for other media - radio and television plays, libretti and screenplays.

David Cameron was born in Glasgow and now works in Belfast. In 2014 he received the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry. His poems are collected in The Bright Tethers, and he has had two books of fiction published, Rousseau Moon and The Ghost of Alice Fields. Champions of his writing over the years have included Seamus Heaney (‘strangeness and credibility at the same time’) and Robert Nye (‘a quality of verbal alchemy by which it transmutes the base matter of common experience into something like gold’).

Ciara MacLaverty was born in Belfast, raised on Islay and lives in Glasgow. She won a Scottish Book Trust Award in 2017 and her second pamphlet, Past Love in The Museum of Transport, explores the places love take us. Her poetry has appeared in New Writing Scotland, The Irish Times, Poetry Scotland and The Poet’s Republic. William Letford wrote of Ciara that she 'takes the everyday and passes it through a prism. How wonderful to see the hidden colours of the ordinary. Bright, beautiful, familiar, magical.'

Eugene Kelly is a Glasgow-born musician/songwriter who began writing and recording music in 1987 with The Vaselines - a duo which Kurt Cobain called his favourite songwriters in the world (Nirvana covered three of their songs). Eugene continued to record and tour throughout the 1990s with the band 'eugenius’, before releasing his solo album 'Man Alive' in 2004.