Readings by Tobias Hill, Hilary Mantel and Eugene McCabe Music by Dunne Hernandez. Presenter: Emer O'Kelly

TOBIAS HILL was born in London. In 2003 the TLS nominated him as one the best young writers in Britain: in 2004 he was selected as one of the country's Next Generation poets and shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year. His first collection of poetry, Year of the Dog, won an Eric Gregory award, the second, Midnight in the City of Clocks, was a PBS Recommendation, and the third, Zoo, was a PBS Special Commendation. In 1996 he won the Cambridge University Harper-Wood Award for Literature, in 1997 he was a Wingate Scholar, and in 1998 he was London Zoo's inaugural Poet in Residence. Hill also writes fiction: his first book of stories, Skin, won the Pen-Macmillan Prize for Fiction and was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys/Mail on Sunday Prize. His bestselling first novel, Underground, won a British Arts Council award and a Betty Trask prize, while the second, The Love of Stones, has been published to acclaim in a dozen countries. The Cryptographer, his third novel, led AS Byatt to observe that "Hill is one of the two or three most original and interesting young novelists working in Britain today...There is no other voice today quite like this."

HILARY MANTEL was born in Glossop, Derbyshire in 1952. Having studied Law at the London School of Economics and Sheffield University, she was employed as a social worker, and lived in Botswana and Saudi Arabia, before returning to Britain in the mid-1980s. In 1987 she was awarded the Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize for an article about Jeddah, and she was film critic for The Spectator from 1987 to 1991. Her novels include Eight Months on Ghazzah Street (1988), set in Jeddah, Fludd (1989), winner of the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, the Cheltenham Prize and the Southern Arts Literature Prize, A Place of Greater Safety (1992), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year award, A Change of Climate (1994) and An Experiment in Love (1995), winner of the 1996 Hawthornden Prize. Her recent novel The Giant, O'Brien (1998) tells the story of Charles O'Brien who leaves his home in Ireland to make his fortune as a sideshow attraction in London. Her latest books are Giving Up the Ghost: A Memoir (2003), an autobiography in fiction and non-fiction, Learning to Talk: Short Stories (2003) and her latest novel, Beyond Black (2005) which tells the story of John March, the absent father from Louisa May Alcott's Little Women.

EUGENE McCABE was born in Glasgow in July 1930 of Irish parents and took over the family farm near Clones in 1955. His published plays for stage include King of the Castle (1978), and his one-act plays Pull Down a Horseman/Gale Day (1979). His plays for TV include Roma (1979), and his trilogy Victims, which consists of Cancer, Heritage, and Siege. Cancer won the Writers Award in Prague, and second prize in the Prix Italia. His short fiction includes the novella and stories Victims: A Tale from Fermanagh (1976), Heritage and Other Stories (1978), Christ in the Fields, A Fermanagh Trilogy (1993), Tales from the Poor House (1999) and the recently published and widely acclaimed collection of stories, Heaven Lies About Us (2005).

DUNNE & HERNANDEZ
Musicians may be the ultimate economic migrants, and when Buenos Aires native Ariel Hernandez arrived in Dublin, he had little save some guitars and a repertoire of songs from his Argentine homeland. It helps that he’s enlisted the formidable services of Ireland’s leading classical accordionist Dermot Dunne, a musician who has assimilated the phrasing and nuance of Ariel’s music with casual ease and authenticity. What began as a festival one-night stand has blossomed into an enduring partnership, and here they invite you to hear the rough hewn folk style of Northern Argentina known as chaquarere.