See above.

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A bus will depart from the Dock Arts Centre at 10.00am sharp, arriving at The Barracks, Cootehall at 10.30.

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Cootehall barracks sits outside the arched entrance to The Bawn, Chidley Coote’s estate house which was built in the latter half of the seventeenth century. The writer, John McGahern lived in the barracks from 1944 to 1953: his father was the serving sergeant there. He, his five sisters and young brother came to live in the barracks when their mother died. John was the eldest. He was nine years old. Today, the Barracks houses an exhibition relating to the author and serves as a community facility for local groups.

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MV Moonriver departs from Cootehall at 12 noon sharp arriving into Carrick on Shannon at 1pm (opposite the Landmark Hotel).

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Zak Moradi, author of Life Begins in Leitrim, award-winning, French-based Irish writer Mary Byrne, and Suad Aldarra, author of I Don’t Want to Talk about Home read from their work and discuss writing, migration, Irish and European immigration policy and the many concepts and complex realities of home in today’s world. 

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Vincent Woods discusses Ken Boyle and Tim Desmond's investigation into the circumstances of the shooting dead of a family doctor in Ireland during the years of the Irish Civil war. 

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A priest and his housekeeper abandon a baby girl on the doorstep of a house near the Black Church in Dublin’s north inner city in February 1923. Three local women notice the couple's suspicious behaviour and apprehend them. The two are handed over to the police, charged and sent for trial. A month later, a young doctor is shot dead on the streets of Mohill, Co. Leitrim. In the days following the shooting of Dr Paddy Muldoon, the name of a local priest was linked to the killing and rumours abounded of a connection to the events in Dublin a month earlier and also that an IRA gang had been recruited to carry out the murder. However, despite an investigation at the time, the murder remained unsolved for almost 100 years. Now, newly discovered archive material from a range of sources, including the Muldoon family, has made it possible to piece together the circumstances surrounding the doctor's death, and reveals how far senior figures in the Church, State and IRA were willing to go to cover up a scandal.

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Síobhra Aiken, author of Spiritual Wounds: Trauma, Testimony and the Irish Civil War discusses the literature of memory and the Irish Civil War, with reference to the work of John McGahern.  Síobhra Aiken is a lecturer in Queen’s University Belfast, a former Fulbright Scholar and author of The Men Will Talk to Me: Ernie O’Malley’s  Interviews with the Northern Divisions.
 

"Spiritual Wounds is a brilliant book that challenges the notion of silence about the Irish Civil War/… and challenges critics to reconsider the relationship between literature, memory and history." – Oona Frawley, editor of ‘Women and the Decade of Commemorations’ and author of ‘Flight’.

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Actress Ruth McCabe, who features in Pat Collins’ forthcoming film adaptation of That They May Face the Rising Sun, reads from the work of John McGahern.

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Cathaoirleach of Leitrim County Council Cllr. Justin Warlock presents the 2023 John McGahern Award.

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Claire Keegan is one of Ireland’s most original and compelling fiction writers. Her first collection of short stories, Antartica, won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the William Trevor Prize. Her second collection of short stories, Walk the Blue Fields, published in 2007 consolidated her reputation as a singular stylist and storyteller, Anne Enright describing the stories as ‘perfect’. Her ‘long, short story’ Foster won the 2009 Davy Byrne Short Story Award and was adapted for film as An Cailín Ciúin. Claire’s novella Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize and has been adapted for film. Her new novella So Late in the Day has just been published by Faber.

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"Everything Claire Keegan writes is singular and impressive. She always writes with breath-taking precision. She is a writer gifted with both a strong sense of drama and perfect pitch." - Éilís Ní Dhuibhne

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Adrian Duncan is a writer, visual artist and film maker. He was born in Longford and originally trained as an engineer. He has published three novels: The Geometer Lobachevsky (2022), A Sabbatical in Leipzig (2020) and Love Notes from a German Building Site (2019); a collection of short stories, Midfield Dynamo (2021); and a non-fiction work Little Republics: The Story of Bungalow Bliss (2022) . He won the John McGahern Book Prize in 2020. He lives in Berlin.

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"Adrian Duncan writes with emotional accuracy and what seems like effortless precision about work and exile, about buildings and cities. To his narratives, he brings a mixture of the exact and the visionary. He is a writer who has come to recreate the world on his own terms." – Colm Tóibín

Gary Younge, winner of the 2023 Orwell Prize for Journalism is an author, journalist, broadcaster and professor of sociology at the University of Manchester. Formerly a columnist and an editor-at-large at the Guardian newspaper, he is is an editorial board member of The Nation magazine (in the UK). He is the author of five books, including Another Day in the Death of America. Dispatches from the Diaspora (2023) is an exploration of the Black diaspora, bringing together a unique body of journalistic work from the Caribbean, Africa, Europe, Britain and the United States.  He lives in London.
"Gary Younge is an outstanding journalist and chronicler of the African diaspora." - Bernadine Evaristo

"Gary is one of our most observant and beautiful writers. No other journalist/author I know of has his intellectual vigour, emotional understanding and grace." - Yasmin Alibhai-Brown
 

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