About
How can the arts help change the world within Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland within the world? The Edinburgh International Festival (1947) and the Salzburg Festival (1929) were both founded by their respective governments in the UK and Germany post-conflict as a high profile international way of bringing culture, countries and communities together again post conflict.
Inspired by both Beckett’s birthday falling on Good Friday and the anniversary of the signing by the Irish and British governments of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 four writers (from Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland and United Kingdom) consider ideas or initiatives that could potentially happen in Northern Ireland by which the international arts might offer new ways forward and have a higher profile and level of support from government in understanding their use and importance for communities of post-conflict societies. How, for example, can the arts engage with trauma, forgiveness and social cohesion? And are there inspiring examples elsewhere of the role of artists and art-forms in a process of imaginative regeneration?
Jan Carson is a writer based in Belfast. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Most recently her short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses was published in 2024. She is the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast 2025.
Alex Clark is a British critic, journalist and broadcaster. A co-host of Graham Norton’s Book Club, she is also a regular on BBC Radio 4 and writes for The Guardian, The Observer and the Irish Times. She has judged many literary awards, including the Booker Prize. She lives in Kilkenny.
Jane Clarke is the author of three poetry collections: The River (2015), When the Tree Falls (2019), short-listed for Irish Times Poetry Now Award, and A Change in the Air (2023) which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Poetry Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Collection. She lives in Co. Wicklow.
Eoin McNamee novels include Resurrection Man, later made into a film, The Blue Tango, which was long-listed for the Booker Prize, Blue is the Night, which was awarded the 2015 Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year, and The Vogue. He lives in Sligo.
Carlo Gébler is a writer and broadcaster. His most recent book is A Cold Eye: Notes from a Shared Island 1989 - 2024.
