Mary Costello has published three novels and two short story collections. Her first collection, The China Factory (2012) was nominated for the Guardian First Book Award. Her first novel, Academy Street, won the Irish Novel of the Year and Irish Book of the Year awards in 2014, and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, the Costa First Novel Prize and the EU Prize for Literature among others. Her second novel, The River Capture (2019), was shortlisted for the Irish Novel of the Year, the Dalkey Book Prize, and the Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Barcelona (2024), her second collection of short stories, was an Irish Times bestseller. Her stories have been published in various literary magazines including The New Yorker. Her latest novel, A Beautiful Loan (2026), has just been published to critical acclaim and was also an Irish Times bestseller. 

“Mary Costello is a writer of a rare and exquisite sensitivity — intimate, piercing, death-haunted — with sentences that can turn on a pin into vastness” Paul Lynch 

Martin Doyle, Books Editor with the Irish Times, and his new book, A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991-2026, has just been published by Lilliput Press.

May Morton (1876 – 1957) was a major Belfast poet who played an important role in the literary circle of her time. She was vice-principal of the Belfast Model School for Girls. Her greatest work, Spindle and Shuttle, is a poem about women mill-workers of Belfast. It won the Festival of Britain, Northern Ireland Prize in 1951. 

The judges deemed it a remarkable poem that “breathes the spirit of our Province.” She was central to the establishment of Northern Irish PEN and campaigned for the freedom of expression for writers. 

Today, sadly, the writings of May Morton and her contribution to Northern Ireland literature are largely forgotten. 

Liz McManus is the editor of a new book of Morton’s poetry published by Arlen House. She says: “My aim is to reclaim May Morton’s work out of obscurity so that she is, no longer, a phantom poet.”