Sinéad Gleeson & Roisin Maguire

We are delighted to welcome to the festival Sinéad Gleeson and Roisin Maguire to discuss their receptive debut fiction novels with Henrietta McKervey. 

Sinéad’s beautifully written, prescient and eerily haunting fiction debut Hagstone takes in the darker side of human nature and the mysteries of faith and the natural world. 

Roisin’s Night Swimmers set on the Northern Irish coastline is a tough, wise and redemptive novel offering a portrayal of the strength of community in an age of loneliness. 

Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life was published by Picador in 2019 and won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at 2019 Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. It was shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Michel Deon Prize. She is the editor of The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland and The Art of Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. Sinéad also collaborates with artists and musicians, with commissions from The Wellcome Collection, BBC, Frieze and various galleries. In 2022, with Kim Gordon, she co-edited This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music, published by White Rabbit Books. Hagstone is her first novel.

Roisin Maguire is an award-winning short story writer who has just published her debut novel in February 2024, Night Swimmers (Serpents Tail, 2024). A former bouncer, diver, support worker and primary-school teacher, Roisin has been writing for many years in  those late-evening spaces between full-time work and raising her four children, but it was the Covid-19  lockdown which gave her the opportunity to write a full length novel, Night Swimmers (Serpents Tail, 2024) to keep her out of the garden and off the cider at 11am. Combining a love of storytelling with a drive to contribute to the wellbeing of the local community, Roisin is currently training as a hypnotherapist and shamanic practitioner – both fields which call for a vivid imagination and a gift of the gab.