Richard O’Rawe is a Belfast author, playwright and a former IRA member who was press officer for the Provisional IRA in Long Kesh in 1981 during the IRA hunger strikes. His controversial revelation that British terms for ending the hunger strike were accepted within Long Kesh, but rejected by the IRA leadership (in his book Blanketmen) put him at odds with many of his erstwhile Republican comrades. He is the author of two works of comic fiction featuring the memorable Ructions O’Hare Hi...

Linda Ervine earned an MBE as a language rights activist in the somewhat unexpected location of unionist East Belfast. She is a speaker and fervent supporter of the Irish language and is the project lead of Turas which "aims to connect people from Protestant communities to their own history with the Irish language". Turas is operated through the East Belfast Mission of the Methodist Church in Ireland. Linda, who comes from a working class socialist background has overcome many obs...

Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s leading writers. The author of eight novels, two books of short stories and many essays, she is a winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), the Andrew Carnegie Medal for fiction (2012) and the Irish Novel of the Year (2007 and 2015). Anne was the first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018) and she is Professor in Creative Writing in UCD. Her most recent novel The Wren, The Wren won The Writers’ Prize for Fiction (2024). Anne Enright was ...

Would the Good Friday agreement ever have happened had it not been for OperationChiffon? Peter Taylor’s book Operation Chiffon: the Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and theRoad to Peace in Ireland takes us inside the top-secret intelligence operation whose roots go back to the bloodiest years of the Northern Ireland conflict in the early 1970s, involving officers from MI6 and, later in the 1990s, MI5. The remarkable story, which has remained hidden for forty years, is now revealed by legendary BBC...

In addition to her hilarious, pomposity-puncturing and (apparently) hourly interventions on Twitter/X, Annie West is one of the country’s most celebrated illustrators and cartoonists. Her unique style is instantly recognisable as is her stalwart support of her home county of Sligo and her passion for the love life of William Butler Yeats. Many of her interests have coalesced in the writing of The Late Night Writers Club where Ireland’s most famous deceased writers desert their pantheon(s) and...