‘These stories are written with a spareness, a wryness, that manage to make the source of their immense power ambiguous and mysterious. In the title story, it is unclear what the dominant emotion is, whether it is grief or shock or fear or resignation. That way of writing at an angle to easy assumptions, easy interpretations, makes Mary Lavin’s stories luminous and memorable.’  Colm Tóibín, Laureate for Irish Fiction 2022-2024

Born in 1912 in Massachusetts, USA, Mary Lavin was the only child of Irish parents. The family returned to Ireland to live when she was a child. She studied English and French in University College Dublin, after which she taught French in Loreto College, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin, where she had gone to school herself.  She was best known for her short stories, many of which featured in The New Yorker,where she was under contract.  Lavin received numerous national and international awards and honours including the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for her début collection, Tales from Bective Bridge (1943), the Guggenheim Fellowship and an Honorary Doctorate from UCD.  Regarded as a pioneering female author, much of her writing focused on feminist issues and the topic of widowhood. She died in 1996. 

Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She is the editor of The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland and The Art of Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. Sinéad has engaged in multi-disciplinary collaborations with artists and musicians, including commissions from City Gallery Wellington, The Wellcome Collection, BBC and Frieze. In 2021, she collaborated with composer Stephen Shannon and artists Aideen Barry on By Slight Ligaments (Limerick City Gallery) and Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon on The Map / We Are The Map (Rua Red). She is co-editor with Kim Gordon of This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music (White Rabbit, April 2022) and is currently working on a novel.

Alice Ryan, who grew up in Dublin, is a graduate of Trinity and the LSE. She spent ten years working in the creative industries, holding roles in publishing, film and TV and was the Head of Insight and Planning at BBC Studios in London before returning to Ireland. She now works in Policy Development at The Arts Council of Ireland and lives in Dublin with her husband Brian and her daughter Kate.
Her debut novel, There’s Been a Little Incident, will be published on 15 September 2022.

Colm Tóibín was born in Enniscorthy Co. Wexford in 1955 and educated at University College Dublin. He lived in Catalonia for several years before he returned to Dublin to work as a journalist, becoming Features Editor of 'In Dublin' in 1981 and editor of 'Magill' in 1982. In 1987, he received a bursary from the Arts Council to support his early writing. His three travel books are: 'Bad Blood: A Walk along the Irish Border' (1987); 'Homage to Barcelona' (1990); and 'The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe' (1984). His ten novels include 'The Master' (2004), winner of the Dublin IMPAC Prize and the LA Times Novel of the Year; 'Brooklyn' (2009), winner of the Costa Novel of the Year; and 'Nora Webster' (2014), winner of the Hawthornden Prize. His two collections of stories are 'Mothers and Sons' (2006), winner of the Edge Hill Prize, and 'The Empty Family' (2010), shortlisted for the Frank O'Connor Award. His plays include 'The Testament of Mary' (2011), nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play. In 1993, he was elected to Aosdána and in 2020 became a vice-president of the Royal Society of Literature. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a contributing editor at the London Review of Books. In 1995, he received the E.M. Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2017 he won the Kenyon Review Award for Literary Achievement and the Richard C. Holbrooke Distinguished Award from the Dayton Literary Peace Prize. In 2021 was awarded the David Cohen Prize. He has taught at Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, Princeton University, the University of Manchester and Columbia University. He is Chancellor of the University of Liverpool.