In Conversation – Belfast Book Festival
Three talented writers from Northern Ireland – Lucy Caldwell, Paul Muldoon and Glenn Patterson – are hosted by BBC presenter and broadcaster Marie-Louise Muir in a conversation about their work and their best books of the year. From Belfast Book Festival. You can view the video at the Big Book Weekend website ...
‘An Openness, an Outwardness’
Lucy Caldwell’s Multitudes and the Possibilities of Fiction (Susanne Stich for Humag) May 2016 saw the launch of award-winning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell’s debut short story collection Multitudes (Faber & Faber), which presents a fresh and powerful portrait of growing up female in 1990s Belfast. I recently caught up with her during the rehearsal process for her new adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters due to premiere at the Lyric ...
The many faces of Lucy Caldwell
by Alex Peake-Tomkinson at Bookanista Multitudes is the first book of short stories from the prizewinning novelist and playwright Lucy Caldwell. The collection is eleven stories strong and each of the stories seems to describe a character in peril so that holding one’s breath whilst reading them sometimes feels unavoidable. Caldwell agrees to meet me to discuss the stories and I worry that she might be quite earnest – few ...
Five Things Right Now: Lucy Caldwell
(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 ...
On Why Short Stories Matter
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 ...
BBC Ulster – The Arts Show
Marie-Louise Muir talks to Lucy Caldwell about her short story collection Multitudes, on BBC Radio Ulster's Arts Show ...
‘Everything you write requires a portion of your soul, I think, to make it live’
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 ...
BBC Radio Ulster “The Arts Show”
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 ...