The Role of the Critic

What is the role of the critic today? 

How has the internet changed the face of criticism? 

What are the differences between writing ‘creative non-fiction’/ fiction and reviews? 

And what role do critics have in fostering vibrant literary cultures? 

Join leading critics Nicole Flattery, Kevin Power and Tanvi Roberts as they think through these questions, and the challenges and possibilities critics now encounter, in a discussion chaired by Tara McEvoy. 

Nicole Flattery's work has been published in The Stinging Fly, the White Review, the Dublin Review, BBC Radio 4, the Irish Times, Winter Papers and the forthcoming 2019 Faber anthology of new Irish writing. Her story Track won the 2017 White Review Short Story Prize. 

Kevin Power is a lecturer at Trinity College Dublin. His novel Bad Day in Blackrock (2008) became a film, What Richard Did (2012), which picked up five awards at the Irish Film and Television Awards. In 2009 Power received the highly coveted Hennessy XO Emerging Fiction Award and was the winner of the 2009 Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His criticism has appeared in The New Yorker Page Turner blog, The Guardian, The Irish Times, Irish Independent, The Stinging Fly, and many other places. In 2021 White City, his much-anticipated second novel, was published to wide acclaim.

Tanvi Roberts writes poems, essays and reviews. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry Ireland Review, The Moth, Trumpet and Rattle. She won the John Kinsella and Tracy Ryan Poetry Prize, was shortlisted for the 2020 Aurora Prize for New Writing and was longlisted for the 2021 National Poetry Competition. As a DIP critic, her work has appeared in the Irish Times, the Dublin Review of Books and Poetry Ireland Review. She has been selected for the 2022 Doire Press Mentorship.

Tara McEvoy is Press Officer for Pushkin Press, London, and a 2022 Writing and the City Fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University, Belfast. She edits the Belfast-based magazine The Tangerine, and in 2020 completed a PhD in English literature at Queen's, with a focus on the work of Padraic Fiacc.