It is our great pleasure to invite you to hear writer and director Gerard Stembridge. Born in Limerick and having worked as a secondary school teacher for five years Gerard give it all up to pursue his dream of working as a writer and director. He wrote the screenplay for Ordinary Decent Criminal (starring Kevin Spacey Linda Fiorentino) and co-wrote Nora, a film about James Joyce and Nora Barnacle Starring Ewan McGregor and Susan Lynch. He has directed the films Guiltrip, Black Day at Black Rock, Alarm and About Adam. As a television producer he bought us Nitehawks and with the late Dermot Morgan he was the driving force behind the radio series Scrap Saturday.

Gerard has written three novels, According to Luke (2006), Counting Down (2010), with his  third novel Unspoken having been launched earlier this year. This novels has been described in The Irish Times, as:
  “…a cheerfully rambling tale, with an old-fashioned tone that focuses on five Limerick children – born on the same day in 1959 – and their families. Reading it is a little like watching Reeling in the Years.”

Friday 2nd November at 1.05pm
Sinéad Moriarty

It is our great pleasure to invite you to hear a reading by Dublin-born author Sinéad Moriarty, whose last three novels all went straight in at number 1 in the Irish charts. Her first novel The Baby Trail depicting a couple struggling to conceive hit a nerve in publishing circles and was snapped up by Penguin Publishing in the UK and Ireland and has been translated into twenty-five languages. Her second book A Perfect Match has been published worldwide. The US version of A Perfect Match is called The Right Fit. Her third novel  From Here to Maternity is the final instalment of the Emma and James trilogy. Her fourth book In My Sister’s Shoes is about two sisters who help save each other. Her fifth book was Whose Life Is It Anyway?

Her sixth book, Pieces of my Heart, about a family dealing with a terrible crisis, went straight in at number 1 in the Irish charts and was nominated for an Irish Book Award. Her seventh book Me and My Sisters went straight in at number 1 in the Irish charts and remained in the top five for 13 weeks. It was also nominated for an Irish Book Award. Her eighth novel, This Child of Mine also went straight in at number 1 in the Irish charts.

Friday 9th November at 1.05pm
Keith Ridgway

It is our great pleasure to invite you to hear a reading by award-winning author Keith Ridgway. His most recent novel, Hawthorn & Child, published by Granta has been met with huge acclaim. His novella, Horses, was published by Faber & Faber in 1997, and was followed in 1998 by the novel The Long Falling (which was awarded both the Prix femina étranger and Prix du premier roman étranger in France). He won the Rooney Prize for Irish literature in 2001 for his short story collection Standard Time. His novel The Parts followed in 2005, and Animals in 2007. His stories have appeared in various anthologies and periodicals in Ireland, Britain and the United States, including The New Yorker, Dublin Review, Zoetrope, and Granta.

Ridgway doesn't so much as redraw the map as show us what was there in the first place.He writes as though he has uncovered something, not invented it; as though these tales, so completely new, have been around for a long time.
Anne Enright