These Days: Lucy Caldwell in conversation with Willam Crawley

We are delighted to welcome to the stage, Belfast Book Festival patron and one of Northern Ireland’s most accomplished contemporary writers Lucy Caldwell who will be joined in conversation by William Crawley to discuss her latest novel These Days.  

This exquisite story, from the Winner of the BBC National Short Story Award 2021, follows two sisters trying to survive life and love against the backdrop of the Belfast blitz 1941 and evokes wartime love and heartbreak. 

‘A captivating novel exploring a lesser known chapter of Northern Ireland’s story. Caldwell has managed to capture the spirit and tenacity of the Belfast I know and love. This is a novel which looks suffering straight in the eye and yet will leave you full of hope.’ Jan Carson

‘A gem of a novel, I adored it.’ Marian Keyes

‘A novel of enormous heart; full of luminous passages of prose, this tale of the Belfast blitz is breathtakingly good.’ Alex Preston, Observer, Fiction to look out for in 2022

Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, including These Days (Faber, March 2022), two short story collections, Multitudes and Intimacies, and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short stories. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for her story All the People Were Mean and Bad.

William Crawley is a journalist and broadcaster with the BBC, presenting TV and radio programmes on subjects as varied as news and politics, arts and science, and religion and ethics. He hosts the daily radio current affairs programme Talkback for BBC Radio Ulster, Sunday on BBC Radio 4, and regularly writes and presents documentaries for BBC Radio 3 and the BBC World Service.  His television work includes the interview series William Crawley Meets, a three-part autobiographical series documenting life in Northern Ireland, Independent People: The Story of Ulster’s Presbyterians, and the 15-part global history of immigration Brave New World.  Educated in Belfast and Princeton, he is a recipient of the Eisenhower Fellowship; in 2012 he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Literature (D.Lit.) degree by Queen’s University Belfast for “exceptional services to broadcasting”; and in 2019 was elected a Member of the Royal Irish Academy.