Memory, Place and Stories We Tell with Mary O’Donnell and Eoin McNamee

How much of who we are is shaped by the places we come from — and by the stories we tell about them? Mary O’Donnell and Eoin McNamee explore the powerful relationship between memory, place and storytelling.

Poet, novelist and short-story writer Mary O’Donnell has been a distinctive voice in Irish literature for more than three decades. Her new novel, Sweep the Cobwebs Off the Sky, is a tender exploration of ageing, memory, family and the desire for reconciliation, set against a landscape inspired by her native Monaghan. Moving between poetry, fiction and short stories throughout her career, O’Donnell writes with psychological insight about the ways the past continues to inhabit the present, and the complicated bonds between people, memory and place.

Eoin McNamee is an acclaimed novelist and screenwriter whose work has repeatedly returned to the borderlands of Northern Ireland and the histories embedded within them. His latest novel, The Bureau, was named among the best books of 2025 and draws on the border landscape and elements of his own family history. The Comets, his collected short fiction, will be published in October 2026. He is the Director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre.

Together, these two remarkable writers will consider what happens when memory becomes story: what we preserve, what we reinvent and what places remember for us. A conversation about landscape and belonging, but also about the mysterious alchemy through which lived experience becomes literature.

Venue Accessibility Information Here