PRESENTED AS PART OF RED LINE BOOK FESTIVAL, 2021
‘A Shock inhabits the secret life of a city, its hidden energies. It dramatizes how patterns form and then disperse, how stories are made and relationships created . . . remarkable’ – Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn
Join award-winning author Keith Ridgway and debut novelist Niall Bourke in conversation of their most recent publications with Joanna Walsh. In A Shock by Ridgway, a clutch of more or less loosely connected characters appear, disappear and reappear. They are all of them on the fringes of London life, often clinging on – to sanity or solvency or a story – by their fingertips. Niall Bourke’s Line is speculative fiction at its most ambitious, leading the reader on a journey to make sense of a world that is ultimately not so different from our own. Author Niamh Campbell will talk to them both about their books, their outlooks and what fiction means to them today.
Keith Ridgway other books include Hawthorn & Child, Animals, The Parts, The Long Falling. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Stinging Fly, Zoetrope, and elsewhere. Widely translated, he is a prior winner of the Prix Femina Étranger, the O. Henry Award, and the Rooney Prize.
Niall Bourke’s short stories have been shortlisted for numerous awards including the Costa Short Story Award, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award and the Over the Edge New Writer Award.. His second poetry collection – a ‘choose your own poetry adventure’ called The Erection Specialists – is forthcoming in 2022 from Broken Sleep Books.
Presented by Red Line Book Festival
Duration: 60 minutes
Age Suitability: 18+
