Roddy Doyle in conversation with Anne Enright

The common Dublin expression, You’re in your granny's, refers to being safe and sound, on home turf, as it were. But Dublin is a city which has undergone significant changes in recent years. In this public conversation, two of the city's, and Ireland's, most celebrated fiction writers discuss the changing character of Dublin as it has appeared in Roddy Doyle's fiction over the last two decades.

Roddy Doyle

Roddy Doyle is one of Ireland's most celebrated and popular writers. From his first novel, The Commitments (1987), through to The Snapper (1990), The Van (1991), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Paddy Clarke, Ha Ha Ha (1993), which won the 1993 Booker Prize, The Woman Who Walked Into Doors (1996), A Star Called Henry (1999), and Oh, Play that Thing (2004) he has been a huge influence on the way in which our capital city is perceived and understood by natives and visitors alike.

"Doyle's performance is, again, extraordinary for the richness of allusion, the facility with which history is dovetailed with invention, the energy of the prose" - Daily Telegraph on Oh, Play That Thing

Anne Enright

With her novels The Wig My Father Wore (1995), which was shortlisted for the Irish Times/Aer Lingus Literature Prize, What Are You Like? (2000), which was shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award and won the Encore Award, and The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch (2002) as well as the short story collection The Portable Virgin (1991), Anne Enright has produced a body of fiction that is often startling, regularly laugh-out-loud and always inventive, placing her among the most important and engaging writers of her generation.

"A spry surrealist who challenges the world with extraordinary, lancing sentences... Enright captures something subterranean with a strange flick of her marvellous insight." - James Wood, The Guardian