“Through the Wardrobe” & “Poison”

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of C.S. Lewis, a new short story, “Through the Wardrobe”, was commissioned by the BBC. An edited version was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on Sunday 24th November at 7.45pm.

You can watch and listen to Lucy reading the story in its entirety at the Word Factory here

Belfast Noir

Meanwhile, another new short story, “Poison”, will be published in Akashic’s prestigious ‘City Noir’ series in spring 2014.

The collection will feature the cream of Northern Ireland’s fiction writing community as well as crime writers from further afield who happen to have a Belfast connection. among them Glenn Patterson, Eoin McNamee, Garbhan Downey & Lee Child.

More details about the anthology, edited by Adrian McKinty and Stuart Neville, can be found here… Read more

Irish Novel of the Year – Shortlist

All The Beggars Riding is among the 5 shortlisted titles for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award 2013, which was announced on April 17at Dublin’s Mansion House by Kerry Group’s Aoife O’Brien. The €15,000 award is the largest monetary prize for fiction available solely to Irish authors. Previous winners of the award include Christine Dwyer Hickey, Anne Enright, Neil Jordan, John Banville, Joseph O’Neill, Roddy Doyle, Sebastian Barry and John McGahern.

The chair of the jury, Robert McCrum said “After an intensive selection process, shared throughout this spring with my distinguished associate Rita Ann Higgins, I am delighted to announce these 5 fine writers for the shortlist of a most important Irish literary prize. It has been such an honour to make a contribution to this part of Listowel Writers’ Week, and I look forward to working with Rita Ann in picking the winner. It’s going … Read more

Belfast’s One City One Book 2013

“You are standing, face upturned to the window, breathing in the sun. I can see you, almost: if I close my eyes I can almost see you. A Thursday morning in May, 1972”.
All the Beggars Riding, a novel by Lucy Caldwell – Belfast choice for One City One Book Belfast 2013

The people of Belfast are being encouraged to get reading with One City One Book which returns to the city this May. All the Beggars Riding, the latest novel by Belfast born author Lucy Caldwell, has been selected as Belfast’s second ‘One City One Book’ read and will be the focus of this Arts Council initiative to develop the art of reading and promote Belfast’s rich creativity. Narrated by Lara, nearing forty and nursing her dying mother,the chosen book is the heartbreaking portrait of a woman confronting her past.
Developed by the Arts Council and supported by … Read more

Lucy interviewed by The Thought Fox

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 it as their One City One Book Belfast choice for 2013.

(this is an excerpt, the full interview can be read here)

Lucy answered a few of our questions …

– Where did the idea come from for All the Beggars Riding?

Some years ago, just after my first novel was published and before I’d even begun my second, I had a dream, in which this double-layered, double-crossing surgeon’s life came to me. It was such a vivid and … Read more

Lucy visits Hydebank Wood Prison

See the original post at Sharing Stories

On 18th September 2013, our shared reading group at Hydebank Wood Prison welcomed a much anticipated visit from Lucy Caldwell, author of the Arts Council’s ‘One City, One Book‘ choice, All the Beggars Riding. We have been reading the novel in our group for a few months now, a few pages one week, swathes of it the next. I read the novel aloud, as I do in all my groups, because we feel it better, that way. We savour the words, the sentences, the pauses and the gaps as they come to life through the simple act of being read (“no book ‘exists’ without a reader”, says Caldwell). And we talk. We pour our own experiences into our reading(s) of the text; the text projects for us a new set of experiences that we map on to our own, and … Read more

The Watcher on the Wall

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of his death, the story of poet Louis MacNeice’s trans-Atlantic love affair with the American short story writer Eleanor Clark and the poetry it inspired, dramatised from his Letters by playwright Lucy Caldwell.

In 1939 Louis MacNeice fell in love. The poet had had a tough few years: his world had fallen apart when his adored wife eloped with their American lodger, and now, with divorce proceedings acrimonious and MacNeice a single parent looking after their young son Daniel, the poet plunges himself into his travels and his work.

Then, in the spring of 1939, MacNeice met Eleanor Clark, a young, beautiful and gifted short-story writer. Their intense, passionate, desperate affair – he in England, she in New York, the war and the Atlantic Ocean between them – consumed the next few years, and the poet’s imagination. Communicating through letters, their relationship becomes for MacNeice … Read more

Interview with 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. I base my fictional documentary on it because it is one of the most moving stories about love I have ever read.”

Lucy describes the difficulty of inventing memoir in a way that makes it truly authentic and credible.

“I had to do such meticulous research. I used a brilliant website that I credit in the book, CAIN (Conflict Archive on the Internet) and using this I was able to check what was actually happening on any given day in … Read more