Retired - You Must Be Joking!

 Éilís Ní Dhuibhne was born in Dublin  She was awarded a Ph D in Irish Folklore from UCD in 1982, and is best known as a writer of fiction. Author of novels, short stories, memoir and drama her work her most recent books are Twelve Thousand Days: A Memoir (shortlisted for the Michel Déon Award 2020) and Little Red and Other Stories (Blackstaff 2020), Selected Stories (Blackstaff 2023), Milseog an tSamhraidh (Clo Iar Chonnacht 2023), and Look! It’s a Woman Writer! (Arlen House, 2021). She has  been the recipient of many literary awards  In autumn 2020 she held the  Burns Scholarship at Boston College. She is a member of Aosdána, and President of the Folklore of Ireland Society. She is the present Laureate for Irish Fiction.

Born in Canada in 1947, Liz has worked as an architect in Derry, Galway, Dublin and Wicklow. She was a newspaper columnist from 1985 – 1993 and her first novel ‘Acts of Subversion’ (1991) was shortlisted for the Aer Lingus/ Irish Times award for New Writing.

Liz has been awarded a Hennessy New Irish Writing award, a Listowel Short Story award and an Irish PEN award. She was granted an MPhil in Creative Writing (with distinction) in 2012 and continued on to write ‘A Shadow in the Yard’ (2015) and ‘When Things Come to Light’ (2023).

Liz has been a parliamentarian for 19 years where she was campaigner for the rights of women and of Travellers, and was the Minister for Housing and Urban Renewal from 1994-97. She is the former chairperson of the Board of the Irish Writers Centre and currently is a Board member of Irish PEN/PEN

Kieran Hanrahan is an Irish radio host and musician. Born in Ennis, County Clare, he began playing traditional Irish music on the tenor banjo at the age of fourteen. Over the years, Hanrahan has helped to found a number of traditional bands, including Stockton’s Wing, Inchiquin, and the Temple-house Ceili Band.

Hanrahan has hosted radio programs for the Irish national broadcaster RTÉ since 1991. Hanrahan is an assistant lecturer at the Conservatory of Music and Drama at Dublin Institute of Technology where he works in the Traditional Music program. He achieved a 1st Class Honors master’s degree (MMus Hons) and was also awarded the DIT Gold medal for Academic Achievement in 2012. Currently he hosts Céilí House, a radio program on traditional Irish music aired weekly in Ireland on RTÉ Radio 1. For the last five years, Kieran Hanrahan has been the artistic director of the Temple Bar TradFest in Dublin, Ireland.