Writing Belfast with Lucy Caldwell, Nandi Jola & Padraig Reagan

We are delighted to welcome to the stage Lucy Caldwell, Nandi Jola and Padraig Reagan, in conversation with Glenn Patterson, on all things writing Belfast: What do the poetics of place mean to these writers; as readers do we consciously search for both realism and escapism? 

Lucy’s These Days (Faber, March 2022) is a haunting novel of the Belfast Blitz; Nandi’s poetry (Home is neither here nor there, Doire Press, April 2022), explores the themes of home and she talks of her writing being “something between Belfast and Africa”; Padraig’s debut collection Some Integrity (Carcanet Press Jan 2022) is a book full of social encounters and exchanges, against a landscape as a form of art.  

Belfast Book Festival Patron 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. 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.

Nandi Jola, originally from South Africa, now lives in Portadown. Her debut poetry collection ‘Home is Neither Here Nor There’ (Doire Press, April 2022), explores the themes of Home, migration and the fragile relationships between human, animals and morals. She has been published in Fortnight@50, Big Issue, Bangor Literary Journal, Affinity, The Incubator and Four X Four. She has also had work commissioned for Herstory: Parallel Peace Project, Transpoesie Poetry Festival; Ambiguities, Six Project, and Arrivals 2. She has been a guest on the BBC Art Show and Culture Café, and has read her work at the Human Rights Festival in Belfast, XBorders, Staccato, the Belfast Book Festival, and the Eastside Festival. 

Padraig Regan is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Delicious (Lifeboat, 2016) and Who Seemed Alive & Altogether Real (Emma Press, 2017). In 2015, they were a recipient of an Eric Gregory Award, and in 2020 they were awarded the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Prize. They hold a PhD on creative-critical and hybridised writing practices in medieval texts and the work of Anne Carson from the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen's University Belfast, where they were a Ciaran Carson Writing and the City Fellow in 2021. This collection is the recipient of the 2021 Clarissa Luard Prize, awarded by the David Cohen Foundation.

Glenn Patterson is the author of ten novels, most recently Where Are We Now. He has written plays for Radio 3 and Radio 4 and is the co-writer of Good Vibrations, an award-winning movie based on the life of Belfast punk impresario Terri Hooley. A collection of his journalism, for among others The Guardian, Sunday Times and Irish Times, was published in 2006 as Lapsed Protestant and in 2008 he published the memoir Once Upon a Hill: Love in Troubled Times. He is a Patron of the Belfast Book Festival.