About
The Omagh Literary Festival: Honouring Benedict Kiely celebrates over 20 years of promoting the work of Benedict Kiely and other contemporary Irish writers. Since 2002, the Committee has invited over 100 speakers including academics, journalists, writers, playwrights, and poets for example Colum McCann, Michael Longley, Sinead Gleeson, among many other distinguished guests.
For their final event in Strule Arts Centre on Saturday 5 August, the Festival Committee, supported by Fermanagh & Omagh District Council is thrilled to invite you to hear award-winning authors Claire Keegan and Wendy Erskine in Conversation.
Claire Keegan's works of fiction have won numerous awards and are now translated into more than thirty languages. Antarctica won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. Walk the Blue Fields won the Edge Hill Prize for the finest collection of stories published in the British Isles. Foster, after winning the Davy Byrnes Award — then the world's richest prize for a story — was chosen by The Times as one of the top 50 works to be published in the 21st Century. Small Things Like These was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and the Rathbones Folio Prize. It won the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction and The Kerry Prize for Irish Novel that year. She was awarded Woman of the Year for Literature in Ireland in 2022.
Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast. Her debut collection, Sweet Home, was published by The Stinging Fly Press in Sept 2018 and Picador in 2019, has been translated into Italian and Arabic and optioned for TV. It won the 2020 Butler Literary Award, was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize 2019, and was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize 2019. The story 'Inakeen' was longlisted for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Prize 2019. Sweet Home was Book of the Year in the Guardian, The White Review, Observer, New Statesman, and TLS. Wendy's second collection of stories, Dance Move, was published in February 2022.
Her work has been published in The Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Female Lines: New Writing from Northern Ireland, and Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber) and read on BBC Radio 4.
