Irish writers at Ottawa International Writers’ Festival - 14-15 April 2016

Thursday 14 April & Friday 15 April - Four Irish writers at Ottawa International Writers’ Festival. Supported by the Embassy of Ireland, Culture Ireland and the Ireland Literature Exchange.

Tickets & info: http://www.writersfestival.org/

Thursday 14 April - Christ Church Cathedral, 414 Sparks St.

6:30pm: SAFE AND SOUND with Paul Lynch, Abdourahman A. Waberi and Carol Daniels.

Dublin’s Paul Lynch is the author of The Black Snow, which Booklist describes as "so starkly brutal and so beautiful that it is impossible to look away.” He takes the pastoral novel and--with the calmest of hands---tears it apart. With beautiful, haunting prose, Lynch illuminates what it means to live through crisis, and puts to the test our deepest certainties about humankind.

8:30pm: RADICAL EMPATHY with Sara Baume, Sunil Yapa and Joan Crate.

Cork’s Sara Baume is the author of Spill Simmer Falter Wither, a captivating story, told over the course of four seasons, of a misfit man who adopts a misfit dog, praised in The Irish Times for its "astonishing power with language [and its] touching and inspiriting sense  of empathy, that rarest but most human of traits.”

Friday 15 April - Christ Church Cathedral, 414 Sparks St.

6:30pm: ALL IN THIS TOGETHER with Farzana Doctor, Monique Schwitter and Christine Dwyer Hickey .

The Lives of Women, by award-winning novelist, playwright and short story writer Christine Dwyer Hickey, was an Irish Times Book Club pick and was praised for "an uncompromising portrayal of the suburbs and the cruelties brought about by the demands of respectability."

8:30pm: THE LONG AND SHORT OF IT with Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm, Kris Bertin and Danielle McLaughlin

Dinosaurs on Other Planets by Cork’s Danielle McLaughlin, includes two stories published in The New Yorker and was heralded by The Irish Examiner as "a remarkable first collection from a distinctive and extremely gifted writer on the brink of major recognition.”