Thursday 31 July | 1.30pm | £12

Wendy Erskine is the celebrated author of two short story collections, Sweet Home and Dance Move. She was shortlisted for the Edge Hill Prize and the Republic of Consciousness Prize, longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, and she received the Butler Literary Award and the Edge Hill Readers’ Choice Award. She edited the art anthology well I just kind of like it. 

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a frequent broadcaster and interviewer. The Benefactors, to be published this Summer, is an outstanding novel about intimate histories, class and money – and what being a parent means. Brutal, tender and rigorously intelligent, The Benefactors is a daring, polyphonic presentation of modern-day Northern Ireland. It is also very funny.

‘The Benefactors is an astonishing novel from a writer at the height of her powers’ – Michael Magee

Alexander Poots is the author of The Strangers’ House: Writing in Northern Ireland, a penetrating study and celebration of Northern Irish literature.