Pacy plots, contemporary issues and teen protagonists. In a ‘golden year’ for NI YA fiction, join Byddi Lee in conversation with two of Northern Ireland’s leading, Carnegie shortlisted writers to discuss their latest novels and writing YA. 

Sue Divin is a Derry-based writer with Armagh roots. Writing with wry humour and emotional punch, her critically acclaimed novels are popular with teens and adults alike. Published in May 2026, Runaway Road (First Ink, Macmillan), is on the Irish Times ‘Best fiction of 2026’ list. Her debut, Guard Your Heart, described as ‘A Romeo and Juliet set in Derry 2016,’ won the Great Reads Award Ireland and was Carnegie shortlisted. Her 2nd novel, Truth Be Told, ‘Parent-trap meets Derry Girls’, was shortlisted in the Irish Book Awards, CBI awards and is on Ireland’s National Curriculum. 

Kelly McCaughrain is a YA author from Belfast. Her debut novel, Flying Tips for Flightless Birds, won a hat-trick of Children's Books Ireland awards, as well as the Northern Ireland Book Award. Her second, Little Bang, was shortlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal and won the Children’s Books Ireland Honour Award for Fiction and the Junior Juries Award. Her new book, Just Another Dead Boy, is a high stakes love and death romance set in a world where everyone knows their own death date. Kelly was the QUB Children’s Writing Fellow 2019–2021 and mentors teen writers for Fighting Words NI.

Sarah Gilmartin is an award-winning Irish writer whose short stories have been published in The Dublin Review, The Tangerine and The Stinging Fly and who won the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award in 2020. Her bestselling debut novel Party (ONE, 2021) was shortlisted for an Irish Book Award and the Kate O’Brien Award. Her second novel Service (ONE, 2023) was a Washington Post top books of summer and included in the Irish Times list of the best Irish fiction of the 21st century (2025). She is the current Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University. Sarah’s wry and deftly observed new novel, Little Vanities (ONE 2026), focusses on two couples, from their Trinity College days to the reckonings of midlife, and explores the distance between the lives we imagine and the ones we find ourselves living.

'Fantastic at examining the tussles between people in relationships' The Times 'Acutely observed, beautifully written' Joseph O'Connor 

'A natural writer' Anne Enright 

Aingeala Flannery, is author of, The Amusements (2022)) which won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year 2023 and the John McGahern Prize.