(chosen for Granta Magazine. See the original article here) 1. Dusty Bluebells documentary The Northern Irish poet Stephen Connolly, @closeandslow, tweeted a link to this old BBC NI documentary from 1971, and I happened to see the tweet, watch the documentary, and was entranced. It’s about Belfast children and the street songs they sang, the games they played, even as their wider world was disintegrating around them. It took me ...
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A good short story: greater than the sum of its parts A short story is a shot of vodka (Chekhov), a love affair to the novel’s marriage (Lorrie Moore), a high wire act (Kevin Barry). It’s a hand grenade, a sprint, a shock, a shiver. There’s something taut, essential, elusive about it. There’s a magic to it, an alchemy. A good short story has to infer the entire and immersive ...
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Marie-Louise Muir talks to Lucy Caldwell about her short story collection Multitudes, on BBC Radio Ulster's Arts Show ...
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Lucy Caldwell, whose collection Multitudes was published yesterday, opens up about it and her adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters to fellow Belfast writer Paul McVeigh (from The Irish Times) Were you always going to be a writer? It seems so – I wrote my first “novel”, “the robin’s party”, when I was 4½. My Mum says that before I could even write I would ask her to fold pages up ...
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Marie-Louise Muir, host of The Arts Show on BBC Radio Ulster, talks to Lucy Caldwell and Sinéad Gleeson about “The Long Gaze Back, an exhilarating anthology of thirty short stories by some of the most gifted women writers Ireland has ever produced ...
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Lucy Caldwell returns to Belfast this month to read from her debut short story collection about young love and growing up. She tells Jenny Lee about being inspired by Van Morrison's lyrics and the near-death experience of her baby son that led to her writing close to the heart (from The Irish News, 10 August, 2015) BELFAST author Lucy Caldwell returns to her roots for the first reading from her ...
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From the award-winning author of The Meeting Point comes another powerful exploration of love, desire and family, featuring a narrator raking over the past to uncover secrets long-buried – secrets that take in The Troubles in 1970s Belfast. All the Beggars Riding confirms Lucy Caldwell as one of the most accomplished young novelists writing today – and we’re delighted to hear that the Arts Council in Northern Ireland have chosen ...
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Eleanor Fitzsimmons © 7 March 2013. Posted on writing.ie “I start the novel with this fictional documentary based very much on the stories told by the Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich (in her book Voices from Chernobyl) using testimony from people, especially women but some men also, firemen and soldiers, who had been involved in the Chernobyl catastrophe. One story in particular is told by a woman about her fireman husband ...
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