Colin Barrett

Award-winning writer Colin Barrett will read from his first novel Wild Houses. Moderated by Nicole Flattery.

In Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses, a simmering feud between a small-time drug dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo’s enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum.

Colin Barrett is from County Mayo. In 2009 he was awarded the Penguin Ireland Prize, and in 2014 his debut collection of stories Young Skins was published and awarded The Rooney Prize, The Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize and The Guardian First Book Award. In 2018 he was announced as the Rolex Arts Initiative Literary Protege, mentored by Colm Toibin. His stories have appeared in The Stinging Fly magazine, the New Statesman, the New Yorker, Harper's and read on Radio 4 and 'Calm With Horses' was adapted for a feature film starring Barry Keoghan, Cosmo Jarvis and Niamh Algar, released in 2020.

Nicole Flattery is the author of the story collection Show Them a Good Time. She is the winner of the An Post Irish Book Award, the Kate O’Brien Prize, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction, and the White Review Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and elsewhere. A graduate of the master’s program in creative writing at Trinity College, she lives in Dublin, Ireland. Her debut novel, Nothing Special, was published in 2023 to critical acclaim.