Womanhood & Experience: Eimear Ryan & Caroline Magennis

Join us for an honest and frank discussion on the role gender still plays in the culture and structures around us. 

Eimear Ryan’s The Grass Ceiling: On Being a Woman in Sport (Penguin Sandycove, 2023), digs into the confluence of gender and sport raising questions on identity, competition and self-expression. For lovers of sport Eimear provides a sharp, nuanced and heartfelt exploration on what it means to be a woman in a male dominated sporting world. 

In her new book Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women (Icon Books, 2024), Caroline Magennis ruminates on the choice of not having children and offers a critique on the structures that condemn women for choosing not to be parents. Caroline reflects on the stereotypes and cultural representations which promote motherhood and asks us to question these structures. 

Eimear Ryan is the author of a novel, Holding Her Breath (2021), and a memoir, The Grass Ceiling (2023), both published by Penguin Sandycove. Other writing has appeared in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Granta, The Dublin Review, The Long Gaze Back (New Island) and Town & Country (Faber). She is a co-founder of the literary journal Banshee and its publishing imprint, Banshee Press. 

Caroline Magennis is Associate Professor (Reader) in Contemporary Literature at the University of Salford, where she teaches as much Irish writing as they will let her get away with. Originally from Portadown, she is the author of Northern Irish Writing After The Troubles (Bloomsbury, 2021), and Harpy: A Manifesto for Childfree Women, was published in May 2024 by Icon Books (English) and Grupo Planeta (Spanish).