Lucy Caldwell: Openings. In conversation with Kathy Clugston

Join Lucy Caldwell to discuss her powerful new collection of short stories Openings (Faber, 2024), with much-loved broadcaster Kathy Clugston. 

From a passionate affair in Blitz-era London, to a highly charged Christmas party in Belfast, to a trip to Marrakech which could form a new family, the thirteen striking stories of Openings pulse with possibility and illuminate those fleeting but recognisable moments of heartbreak and hope that can change the course of a life. 

In this much-anticipated third collection, Lucy continues her exploration of the contemporary female experience, as she delves deeper into motherhood and marriage, love and longing. 

Lucy Caldwell, a patron of the Belfast Book Festival, is the author of four novels, most recently These Days, which won the 2023 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction, three short story collections, Multitudes, Intimacies, and the forthcoming Openings (Faber May 2024), and several stage plays and radio dramas. 

She is also the editor of Being Various, the latest volume in the ongoing Faber series of New Irish Short stories. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, her awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. In 2021 she won the prestigious BBC National Short Story Award for her story All the People Were Mean and Bad, and in 2022 was awarded the EM Forster Prize from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.

Kathy Clugston is a well-known voice on BBC radio. After many years as a Radio 4 newsreader in London she now hosts the long-running programme Gardeners’ Question Time and, since returning home to live in Belfast, the weekly entertainment show The Ticket on BBC Radio Ulster. She is also a presenter on BBC Radio 4 Extra and has a monthly column in Ulster Tatler magazine.