Patron’s Picks: Lucy Caldwell: Wendy Erskine & Yan Ge

Join us for the first event of the Belfast Book Festival 2023!

Lucy Caldwell, Patron of the Festival and one of Northern Ireland’s leading literary lights, in conversation with two stellar short story writers, Wendy Erskine and Yan Ge. 

Belfast Book Festival Patron Lucy Caldwell is the author of four novels, including These Days (Faber, March 2022), two short story collections, Multitudes and Intimacies, and several stage plays and radio dramas. She is also the editor of Being Various. 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, a Fiction Uncovered Award 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.

Wendy Erskine is a Belfast-based writer. Her debut short story collection, Sweet Home, was published by The Stinging Fly Press and Picador. It was shortlisted for The Republic of Consciousness Prize and The Edge Hill Prize, and was longlisted for The Gordon Burn Prize. It won the Butler Literary Prize and was optioned for TV. Her second collection, Dance Move, was published in February 2022 by The Stinging Fly and Picador. 

Yan Ge is a fiction writer in both Chinese and English. The English translation of her novel Strange Beasts of China was a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. Her English language debut short story collection Elsewhere is coming out via Faber (UK) and Scrinber (US) in 2023. She lives in Norwich with her husband and son. Author photo credit: Joanna Millington.