In the April 1 event of the Irish Women's Writing Festival hosted by UConn’s Irish Literature Honors class, Irish writer Caoilinn HUGHES discusses her novel of sibling disloyalty in post-"Celtic Tiger" rural Ireland, The Wild Laughter (2020). The novel has been praised as a "dark comedy" that "reads like a post-boom Beckett."
Caoilinn Hughes’s first novel, Orchid & the Wasp (2018), won the Collyer Bristow Prize 2019, and her poetry collection, Gathering Evidence (Carcanet 2014), won the Irish Times Strong/Shine Award. Her short fiction won The Moth Short Story Prize 2018, a 2019 O. Henry Prize, and the Irish Book Awards Story of the Year 2020. The Wild Laughter, her second novel, was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year 2020. She holds a PhD from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and is the current Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.
Irish Women’s Writing Festival schedule of remaining events:
Apr. 1: Caoilinn Hughes on her novel, The Wild Laughter
Apr. 8: Claire Kilroy on her novel, The Devil I Know
Apr. 20: Claire Bracken (Union College) survey talk on Irish Women’s Writing
All events free, open, and from 12:30-1:30 p.m. at the same WebEx “classroom.” Contact host Prof. Mary Burke (mary.burke@uconn.edu) regarding WebEx admittance to events and for accommodation requests.
Sponsored by Irish Studies/Department of English
For more information, contact: Mary Burke at mary.burke@uconn.edu