A reading of 'The Little Red Balloon', the winning entry in the 15-18 category of the Children's Short Story competition, by 17-year-old Emma Broderick, of Muckross Park College, Dublin.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Darran Anderson about his memoir of growing up in Troubles-torn Derry, Inventory: A River, A City, A Family.They discuss the book's themes of family, history and memory, its inspiration found in the ideas of Georges Perec, and how it relates to his previous work, Imaginary Cities, an exploration of urban landscape…

Welcome to The Irish Times Books Podcast. In this latest episode, Martin Doyle talk to The Irish Times’s two regular crime fiction reviewers, Declan Burke and Declan Hughes, both acclaimed crime writers themselves, about their favourite crime fiction of 2019. So get your pen and paper ready to take note of some excellent suggestions for your crime …

On the eve of this weekend’s Echoes festival in Dalkey, celebrating Maeve Binchy and Irish writing, its programmer, author Henrietta McKervey, and Maeve’s widower, Gordon Snell, join me to talk about the thinking behind the festival and the many ways in which Maeve’s memory is being kept alive.The festival always has Maeve at its heart but each yea…

It has been some year for Danielle McLaughlin. On Thursday, she won the 2019 Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, whose £30,000 (€33,500) prize money makes it the world’s richest for a short story. Last March, she was awarded the $165,000 (€150,000) Windham-Campbell Prize for fiction.The former solicitor from Co Cork, who only took up writing se…

Antony Farrell, of Lilliput Press, which this year celebrates its 35th anniversary, discusses his career in publishing, the history of the press and the “genius” authors with whom he has worked over the years, including Hubert Butler – “he was a secular saint to me” – Tim Robinson, John Moriarty and Desmond Hogan.He talks about his background – his…

Welcome to the latest Irish Times Books Podcast, an interview with Mick Herron, the author of the Slough House series of spy novels.Herron is originally from a working-class background in Newcastle but went on to study English at Oxford, where he still lives.Described as the John le Carré of his generation, he has created the bestselling Slough Hou…

Author Joseph O'Connor talks to Martin Doyle about his new novel Shadowplay, a complicated love affair featuring Dracula creator Bram Stoker, the first Irish writer he fell for.They also talk about his career from Cowboys & Indians to Star of the Sea, and his next project - a novel based on Hugh O’Flaherty, the Kerry priest who saved more than 6,00…

Welcome to The Irish Times Books Podcast, which this week features my interview with Sarah Crossan, Ireland’s Laureate na nÓg.Crossan is one of Ireland’s most successful Young Adult writers, having won the Carnegie Medal in 2016 for her verse novel, One, and been shortlisted twice, for The Weight of Water and Apple & Rain.We discuss her latest youn…

Laura Slattery interviews children's author Shane Hegarty about what it means to write for children, with their surprisingly strong taste for peril and horror, and how his own kids's brutal honesty helps him to create his books. Shane's books for children include the Darkmouth series, which has been praised by critics for its fast-paced action, wit…

April’s Irish Times Books Podcast features interviews with Sinéad Gleeson about her acclaimed collection of personal essays, Constellations, and Sarah Davis-Goff, co-founder of Tramp Press, about her own first novel, Last Ones Left Alive, a dystopian novel set in the west of Ireland in the near future.…

Martin Doyle talks to young author Kevin Breathnach about his acclaimed debut collection of essays, Tunnel Vision, which mixes art history with remarkably candid accounts of his own life. Plus: In the five decades since their inception, the Hennessy New Irish Writing Awards have helped to launch the careers of many of Ireland’s best known authors, …

Laura Slattery talks to Lisa Harding, author of Harvesting.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Books Editor Martin Doyle talks to Helen Cullen about her novel The Lost Letters of William Woolf.Recorded at the Waterford Writers Festival.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Grace, the third novel by Irish author Paul Lynch, was the winner of this year’s Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. In this month’s Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded at the Irish Writers Centre in Parnell Square in Dublin, Lynch tells us how he came to write the story of a young girl as she crosses the famine-stricken Ireland of the 1840s.L…

The Trick to Time by Kit de Waal is May’s Irish Times Book Club choice. Longlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction even before it was published in late March, it is a tragic Birmingham Irish love story set against the backdrop of the IRA bombings that devastated the city in 1974.Kit spoke to Martin Doyle at the International Literature Festival D…

This month's guest is Sinéad Gleeson, one of Ireland's leading arts journalists. She is a former presenter of the book show on RTE radio and the editor of three anthologies of Irish short stories. Next year Picador will publish a collection of Sinéad's own essays, provisionally titled 'Constellations'. She talked to Martin Doyle at the Irish Writer…

This episode features a conversation between Irish Times Books Editor Martin Doyle and June Caldwell, author of Room Little Darker, at the Mountains to Sea festival in Dun Laoghaire last month. As ever, the podcast recording was preceded by a series of articles about Room Little Darker on irishtimes.com, written by fellow authors and critics includ…

Conversations With Friends, Sally Rooney’s critically acclaimed first novel, has picked up deserved word-of-mouth momentum since it was published earlier this year. In this month’s Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded live at the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin, Rooney explains how it came into being.For those who have yet to succumb to the pleas…

Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty is October’s Irish Times Book Club pick. The Edgar Award-winning thriller is the fifth in the Carrickfergus-born author’s Sean Duffy series about a Catholic RUC man set in Troubles-era Northern Ireland.McKinty spoke with Irish Times Books Editor Martin Doyle in Belfast’s Europa Hotel on Saturday, October 28th as part of …

Why do so many readers tell writer Neil Hegarty that he captured their own family dynamic in his debut novel Inch Levels? Perhaps the burial of past traumas was so common an enterprise in Ireland among a certain generation, it meant many of the next generation grew up absorbing the bleak effects of this silence – the theme of Hegarty’s book. In thi…

This month's novel is Married Quarters by Shane Connaughton. Books Editor Martin Doyle interviewed him at the West Cork Literary Festival.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Welcome to the Irish Times Book Club podcast for June 2017.If this is your first time listening, you might be wondering how this works.Each month we run a series of articles on irishtimes.com on a chosen author. And at the end of each month we hold a public interview with that author at The Irish Writer's Centre on Parnell Square here in Dublin. It…

This week the Man Booker International Prize, awarded for fiction translated in English, was won by David Grossman and his translator Jessica Cohen for his novel A Horse Walks Into a Bar. They both spoke to Irish Times Literary Correspondent Eileen Battersby.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Laura Slattery interviews EM Reapy about her novel Red Dirt at The Irish Writer's Centre.www.irishwriterscentre.iewww.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-book-clubAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Eileen Battersby interviews Conor O'Callaghan about his novel Nothing on Earth at The Irish Writer's Centre.https://irishwriterscentre.iehttp://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/the-book-clubAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Irish Times literary correspondent Eileen Battersby joins Martin Doyle for a discussion about the shortlist of nominees for the International Dublin Literary Award, of which Anne Enright is the only Irish writer.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Michael Collins, the Man Booker and International Dublin Literary Award shortlisted author, who last year ran a marathon a day for a month to raise awareness of Canada’s Irish Famine victims, talks to Irish Times Books Editor Martin Doyle about his career spanning Ireland and Rust Belt America.This conversation took place at the Ennis Book Club Fes…

Eileen Battersby talks to Martin Doyle about the works included on the 2017 Man Booker International Prize for fiction in English translation, and some of the notable omissions.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Visitors are reminded that they are about to enter the Wunderkammer, a floating chamber where normal spacetime conventions no longer apply…Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland has been described by Claire Kilroy as a book about how we process trauma and by Rosemary Jenkinson as less of an airport novel, more of a “rocket launch pad novel”.In a p…

To celebrate the centenary of the birth of author and New Yorker magazine staff writer Maeve Brennan, whose work went largely unnoticed here until after her death, Irish Times books editor Martin Doyle and journalist Patrick Freyne talked to her biographer Angela Bourke.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Anakana Schofield talks to Laura Slattery about Martin John, "a novel about compulsion, poverty and sexual deviance".Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Welcome to the Irish Times Book Club podcast, recorded earlier this month in association with the Irish Writers Centre in Dublin’s Parnell Square. This month’s title is Solar Bones by Mike McCormack, currently shortlisted for the Goldsmiths Prize.It is 20 years since McCormack’s debut collection of stories, Getting it in the Head, won him the prest…

This month's book club features Lucy Caldwell, author of Multitudes, in conversation with Laura Slattery.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

This month's podcast.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Joanna Walsh, author of Vertigo, talks to Laura Slattery in the Irish Writers’ Centre about how she writes, her distinctive take on the short story, women writers and eroticaAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Henrietta McKervey reads an extract from her second novel, The Heart of Everything, and discusses with Martin Doyle, assistant literary editor of The Irish Times, its themes of memory and its loss, family relationships and dementia .Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Rob Doyle discusses his collection of inter-linked fictions, This is the Ritual, his follow-up to his successful debut, Here are the Young Men, with Laura Slattery, co-host of the Irish Times Book Club podcast, in front of a live audience at the Irish Writers Centre, Dublin. The wide-ranging interview explores the author’s autobiographical approach…

The Glorious Heresies author Lisa McInerney talks to Martin DoyleAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Mrs Engels author Gavin McCrea talks to Laura Slattery.Af The Irish Times Books Podcast

Thomas Morris- We Don't Know What We're Doing by by The Irish Times Books PodcastAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Author Danielle McLaughlin meets The Irish Times Book ClubAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Caitriona Lally on Eggshells by The Irish Times Books PodcastAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Dublin Books Festival 2015 - Harry Clifton, Michael Longley and Paula Meehan in conversation with Arminta WallaceAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

The Book Club Podcast - Louise O'Neill by The Irish Times Books PodcastAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Joseph O'Connor by The Irish Times Books PodcastAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

The Book Club: Christine Dwyer Hickey discusses The Lives of Women with Laura Slattery in the Irish Times studioAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

MArtin Doyle interviews Eoin McNamee for The Irish Times Book ClubAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Award-winning author Alexander McCall Smith joins Gary Quinn on a whiskey tasting in The Palace Bar in DublinAf The Irish Times Books Podcast

Mary Costello joins Gary Quinn in studio to discuss her latest book Academy Street with book club readers Orna Mulcahy and Lorcan CollinsAf The Irish Times Books Podcast