Kit de Waal in conversation with Martin Doyle

SAT 26 MAY | 6PM | Main Space | €12/10

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Kit de Waal’s debut My Name Is Leon, a heartrending story of a child’s desire to keep his fractured family together in early 1980s Britain, took the book world by storm in 2016. It was shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2017. Set in Birmingham in 1972, The Trick to Time, her beautiful and honest new tale of grief, longing and love, asks: if you lost the love of your life, what would you do to live again?

In conversation with Martin Doyle, Books Editor, The Irish Times.
‘Startlingly funny. Balances the gritty with the feel good.’ The Observer on My Name is Leon

Bae Suah

SUN 27 MAY | 12PM | Main Space | Free Admission

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One of Korea’s most radical and experimental writers, Bae Suah has published more than ten short story collections and five novels, and translated works by W.G. Sebald, Franz Kafka and Jenny Erpenbeck from German. In her most recent book, Recitation, a group of emigrants meet a mysterious, wandering actress in an empty train station. A fragmentary yet lyrical meditation on language, travel and memory, Recitation challenges traditional notions of storytelling and identity.

The translation is by Deborah Smith, who also translated Han Kang’s The Vegetarian and Human Acts.

Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Eimear McBride & Yehuda Shaul

SUN 27 MAY | 2PM | Main Space | €12/10

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Renowned writers Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman joined forces with Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence, the organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories, to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories. Kingdom Of Olives And Ash is a powerful and moving collection of writing determined to enable readers to understand the human narratives behind the litany of destruction broadcasted on the news.

Join Eimear McBride, author of acclaimed novels The Lesser Bohemians and A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and Yehuda Shaul, founding member Breaking the Silence; as they discuss this vital and unsettling anthology.

Presented by Trócaire and Breaking the Silence in association with ILFDublin.

Rachel Kushner

SUN 27 MAY | 4PM | Main Space | €10/8

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‘I’m definitely interested in what seems to be a tradition of writers caring about people whom society has disappeared into enclosures,’ said Rachel Kushner of her new novel The Mars Room, which explores a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. Join bestselling author of The Flamethrowers – a finalist for the National Book Award, and a New York Times Top Ten Book of 2013 – at ILFDublin to hear more about her compelling and fearless new novel about love, friendship… and prison.

‘Kushner’s insights into place, society and the complicated rules of belonging, and unbelonging, can be mordantly brilliant.’ – The New York Times

Arnold Thomas Fanning

SUN 27 MAY | 6PM | Main Space | €12/10

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Playwright and author, Arnold Thomas Fanning’s short stories and essays have been published in Banshee, the Irish Times and Gorse among others. His acclaimed play McKenna’s Fort paints a fascinating picture of Roger Casement, one of Irish history’s most controversial figures. Rough Sleeper, his acclaimed story about his experiences of being homeless and suffering with bipolar disorder in London, was published in the Dublin Review. His new memoir Mind on Fire is a beautifully written, devastatingly intense account of madness and recovery, written with startling precision, honesty and intimacy.

Check out the full programme of ILF Dublin events: