Eimear McBride To Read At UCC, March 20th

We’re delighted to announce that, on March 20^th, acclaimed, award-winning author Eimear McBride will come to UCC, with a public event to mark the arrival of her new novel, The City Changes Its Face.

Eimear McBride is the author of four novels: A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, The Lesser Bohemians, Strange Hotel and The City Changes Its Face. She has won the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, the Kerry Prize, and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. She also held the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. Widely recognised as one of the most important writers working in English, she and her work have been described as follows:

‘A writer of remarkable power and originality’ Times Literary Supplement

‘A writer for whom language is an end not a means, a beginning not an end’ Jeanette Winterson

‘One of our major novelists’ The Guardian

‘Something of a genius’ Sebastian Barry

The City Changes Its Face is an intense story of passion, jealousy and family from a trail-blazing writer. A rainy Camden night, December 1996. Twenty-year-old Eily and forty-year-old Stephen retrace the course of their two-year love affair in search of what’s gone wrong. Is it Stephen’s reconnection with his long-lost teenaged daughter, Grace? Or that he’s a well-known actor while Eily’s still at drama school? Maybe the autobiographical film he’s just made has brought his old demons back to the surface? Or perhaps Eily’s youth has led her into a mistake she doesn’t know how to fix? Intimate, experiential and immersive, this is the story of what happens when it’s love beyond question, but trouble comes along anyway.

Please join us on March 20^th, 6.30pm at the Dora Allman Room, The Hub, UCC to witness Eimear perform from her new novel, with discussion afterwards. The event is free to attend, but ticketed. To make sure of a seat, please reigster via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/eimear-mcbride-the-city-changes-its-face-tickets-1266962893119?aff=oddtdtcreator.

The School of English & Digital Humanities is thrilled to welcome two new Lecturers in Creative Writing to the Creative Writing Programme team: Eimear Ryan and Rosa Rogers.

Eimear Ryan is the author of a novel, Holding Her Breath (Penguin Sandycove, 2021), and a memoir, The Grass Ceiling (Penguin Sandycove, 2023). Other writing has appeared in Granta, The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She is a co-founder and editor of Banshee literary journal and its publishing imprint, Banshee Press. From Co. Tipperary, she now lives in Cork city.

Dr Rosa Rogers (she/her) is an Anglo-Irish writer and interdisciplinary artist, originally from Yorkshire. She holds a PhD in The Contemporary Novel for her forthcoming debut, Composition, which explores the coming-of-age tale of a working-class daughter of the Irish diaspora. Her writing has been published widely, including Flash Fiction North, A Personal Anthology, The Menteur, and The Mersey Review, and her multimedia projects have been exhibited at The Photographers' Gallery (London), Reid Hall (Paris), and as part of The Bookshop Podcast's Creative Series (Ojai, California). She is the founder of Poetry Etc, Tales of a Town and former Co-Director of Vortex Gallery, where she has spent nearly a decade advocating in community settings for increased access to arts and literary education.

Eimear and Rosa are brilliant additions to the creative writing team, and are delivering creative writing modules across undergraduate and postgraduate English studies at University College Cork. You can learn more about creative writing at UCC here.

Acclaimed Author Mike McCormack To Read at UCC on October 7th

The School of English and Digital Humanities at UCC is thrilled to announce that acclaimed author Mike McCormack will read at an exclusive, open-to-the-public event at UCC on October 7th, 6.30pm. 

Mike McCormack is an award-winning Irish novelist and short-story writer. He was raised on a farm in County Mayo, and has published two collections of short stories, Getting It In the Head and Forensic Songs, and four novels — Crowe's Requiem, Notes from a Coma, Solar Bones, and This Plague of Souls.  

In 1996, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. In 1998, Getting It In the Head was voted a New York Times ‘Notable Book of the Year’. In 2006, Notes from a Coma was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year Award, and is currently on the Senior Cycle reading list for Leaving Certificate English. In 2016, Solar Bones (a book in a single sentence) won the Goldsmiths Prize, was long-listed for the Booker Prize, was named "Novel of the Year" by the Irish Book Awards, and won the Dublin International Literary Award (previously known as the IMPAC). His latest novel, This Plague of Souls, follows a painter named Nealon as he returns home from prison and sets out to find his wife and child amid brewing global unrest.  

Described as ‘a disgracefully neglected writer’ early in his career, the success of his later work has asserted him as one of the great Irish novelists. Over the years, his cutting edge work has been adapted for the screen and the stage. He lives in Galway with his wife, the artist Maeve Curtis, and their son, and is the Director of the University of Galway’s MA in Creative Writing. 

We are delighted to welcome Mike to UCC on October 7th (6.30pm) for a public reading and discussion of his superb work.  

Where: Dora Allman Room, The Hub, UCC Main Campus 

When: October 7th, 6.30pm 

Booking: Tickets are free, and all are welcome, but to ensure a seat register for this event at the following link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/mike-mccormack-at-ucc-public-reading-discussion-tickets-1015172497267