Wendy Erskine: The Benefactors

Join us to celebrate Wendy Erskine’s debut novel at this conversation with Belfast Book Festival Patron Lucy Caldwell.

Following the renowned short-story collections, Dance Move and Sweet Home, The Benefactors (Sceptre, 2025) centres on three very different Belfast women whose 18-year-old sons are accused of sexual assault. From parenthood to class and money, this daring, polyphonic novel is one of 2025’s most anticipated books.

In Lucy’s words: “The Benefactors brims with humanity. It's got snap, it's got sparkle, it's got soul. All of Belfast is here, all of life.”

Wendy Erskine is the author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers' Choice Award. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer, and works as a secondary school teacher in Belfast. The Benefactors is her debut novel.

Lucy Caldwell is a Belfast Book Festival Patron, and the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, three short story collections, Multitudes, Intimacies, and the Openings, and several stage plays and radio dramas. 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, 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 and in 2022 was awarded the EM Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.