The winter reading of the School of English series will feature three of Ireland’s most experimental writers.  Mike McCormack, whose novel Solar Bones won the 2016 Goldsmiths Prize – http://www.gold.ac.uk/goldsmiths-prize – Claire -Louise Bennett, author of the acclaimed Pond, and poet Conor O’Callaghan, whose debut novel, Nothing on Earth, was nominated by Irish Times critic Eileen Battersby, as a book of the year, will read together this month at UCC.

The reading takes place at the Creative Zone, Boole Library, on Tuesday, January 31 at 7.30pm.  Admission is free and all are welcome.

All three writers push the boundaries of the novel and short story form and come trailing prizes and plaudits.  McCormack’s Solar Bones – published by the Irish independent small press, Tramp – http://www.tramppress.com – won the Bord Gais Novel of the Year and Overall Book of the Year award.

Pond, a collection of narrative fragments, also published originally by small press, The Stinging Fly – http://www.stingingfly.org/stinging-press – was shortlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize and was named a best book of the year by Elle, New York Magazine, The San Francsico Chronicle, The Huffington Post, Buzzfeed, Electric Literature, BookPage and Publishers’ Weekly. 

Nothing on Earth, (Doubleday Ireland), a ghost story set on a ghost estate, was described as “one of the most impressive pieces of Irish fiction writing since Neil Jordan’s The Dream of a Beast, ” by Irish Times critic Eileen Battersby – http://www.irishtimes.com/ – and was nominated by author John Banville as one of his 2016 books of the year in The Guardian.