“Sadie Jones is a great stylist and a fine storyteller.”
Joan Bakewell

“Glenn Patterson has become … one of the best contemporary Irish novelists.”
Colm Tóibín

Chairperson: Susan McKay.

Dublin Writers Festival brings together two novelists whose latest works converge on the 1970s, exploring friendships formed and tested over time. Since her bestselling debut The Outcast, a devastating portrait of small-town hypocrisy, was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and won the Costa First Novel Award in 2009, Sadie Jones has written novels set in revolutionary Cyprus and Edwardian England. Her fourth novel, Fallout, unfolds in the damp bedsits and smoky bars of London, where aspiring young playwright Luke Kanowski is torn between the life he loves and the woman he is fighting to save. Glenn Patterson’s novels have covered everything from the story of a house (Number 5) to tales of love and injustice in 1830s Belfast (The Mill for Grinding Old People Young). Fresh from the screenplay for Good Vibrations, the much-admired biopic of Terry Hooley, Patterson returns to the era of punk with The Rest Just Follows, a story of Craig and Maxine, two teenagers growing up on different sides of town who find, as the decades pass, their lives becoming inextricably entwined.