Chairperson: Selina Guinness

Dublin Writers Festival brings together two acclaimed authors whose eagerly-anticipated new works explore the nature of memory and the past.

“Deirdre Madden’s fiction is getting better and better,” wrote The Independent’s Patricia Craig, reviewing her Orange Prize-shortlisted novel Molly Fox’s Birthday. For readers familiar with her work it’s an exciting prospect. For almost thirty years Madden has explored the nature of artifice, memory and the self in thoughtful, nuanced prose. Her new novel, Time Present and Time Past, introduces Fintan Buckley, a thoroughly conventional legal adviser and family man living in Howth, who begins to experience altered states of consciousness that throw up long-buried recollections of his past.

Rebecca Miller was already an award-winning film director before her first book Personal Velocity came out in 2001. A spare, incisive, and intensely cinematic collection of short stories, it was soon made into a film that won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, while Miller’s debut novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, about a New England housewife and mother struggling to free herself from a stifling existence, was a bestseller. Her follow-up, Jacob’s Folly, set in eighteenth-century Paris and twenty-first- century New York, explores the power of the past and the collision of fate and free will.