Share what you're reading and discuss anything book related with a new online community, The Bealtaine Book Club! Our facilitator Mia Gallagher has put together two suggested reading lists (inspired by the theme of resilience to coincide with Age & Opportunity's response to Covid-19), and will interview authors Catherine Dunne and Neil Hegarty live. We hope this will be a great opportunity to discover interesting books, get inspired and meet like-minded people - all from the comfort of your home.

Join the Bealtaine Book Club Facebook group HERE.

Mia Gallagher

Mia Gallagher writes novels, stories and non-fiction, and has devised and written for the stage. Her novels are HellFire (2006), awarded the Irish Tatler Women of the Year Literature Award 2007, and Beautiful Pictures of the Lost Homeland (2016), long-listed for the Republic of Consciousness Award 2017. Her stories have been published widely and were collected in Shift (2018), which was longlisted for the 2019 Edge Hill Award and shortlisted for the 2018 Irish Book Awards. Most recently Mia was commissioned by Ennis Book Club Festival to curate an exhibition of visual artworks from the Arts Council’s Collection, entitled Metamorphosis: Characters in Collision, and then write a new story in response to the artworks. The story, Relict, was published as an illustrated limited-edition chapbook. Mia is a contributing editor with the Stinging Fly, and a member of Aosdána.

Catherine Dunne

Catherine Dunne is the author of ten published novels. Her one work of non-fiction, An Unconsidered People, is a social history that explores the lives of Irish immigrants in London in the 1950’s.

Among her novels are: The Things We Know Now, which won the Giovanni Boccaccio International Prize for Fiction in 2013 and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. The Years That Followed was published in 2016 and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award.

In 2019, she was the recipient of the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.

This is an online event. A link will be sent to your email address 24hrs before the event is due to start. This link will not be live before this.