This programme features Madeleine D’Arcy on campus, in the old College Bar before it was converted into a sensory-sensitive space for autistic college students. Madeleine holds an MA in Creative Writing from UCC. Her début short story collection, Waiting For The Bullet won the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Prize 2015. In 2010 she received a Hennessy Literary Award for First Fiction and the overall Hennessy Literary Award for New Irish Writer. Here she reads from her latest work, Feeling Savage, a novel set mainly in Cork and London in the 1980’s. Her second collection of short stories, Liberty Terrace, is scheduled for publication in 2021.

The guest author at Fiction at the Friary is Elizabeth Reapy, an Irish writer who was UNESCO City of Literature Writer-in-Residence in Dublin from 2017 to 2018. She was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2017 and in 2016 she won Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year at the Bord Gais Energy Irish Book Awards for her debut novel Red Dirt. She reads from her second novel, Skin, published in 2019.

The open mic readers are Deirdre Kingston and Kevin Power.