Kildare Readers' Festival: Una Mannion and Jamie O’Connell

Join us for what promises to be a fascinating discussion with two writers garnering huge praise and attention for their debut novels. Una Mannion’s A Crooked Tree is a haunting and suspenseful coming-of-age story about an American family grappling with the consequences of one fateful evening. While Jamie’ O’Connell’s book Diving for Pearls weaves the stories of six disparate characters in Dubai whose paths and cultures collide when an Emirati woman’s body is found deal in the marina. Una and Jamie will be joined in conversation by writer, performer, and cultural consultant Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan.

Una Mannion was born in Philadelphia and has lived in the northwest of Ireland since the 1990s. She writes poetry and prose and has won numerous prizes for her work including the Hennessy Emerging Poetry Award (2017), Doolin short story, Cúirt International short story, Ambit short story and others. Her work has been published in the Irish Times, Winter Papers, The Lonely Crowd, and was recently included in The Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories edited by Sinéad Gleeson. She is the programme chair of the writing programme at IT Sligo and edits The Cormorant, a broadsheet of prose and poetry. Her debut novel, A Crooked Tree was released by Faber in January 2021.

Jamie O'Connell has had short stories highly commended by the Costa Short Story Award and the Irish Book Award Short Story of the Year. He has been longlisted for BBC Radio 4 Opening Lines Short Story Competition and shortlisted for the Maeve Binchy Travel Award and the Sky Arts Futures Fund. He has an MFA and MA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin. He has worked for Penguin Random House, Gill Books and O'Brien Press. Diving for Pearls is his first novel.

Chandrika Narayanan-Mohan (She/Her) is a Dublin-based writer, performer, and cultural consultant from India. Her work has been included in publications by Dedalus Press, UCD Press, Book Hub Publishing, Banshee, and Poetry Ireland, amongst others. Chandrika is editor of Poetry Ireland’s Trumpet issue 9, book reviewer for Children’s Books Ireland’s Inis magazine, and is a Science Gallery Dublin Rapid Residency Artist. She is also on the Board of the Irish Writers Centre.

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