Chairperson: Eamon Maher

Movies, fathers and sons, and Irish antecedents link two distinctive writers separated by continents, cultures and a whole lot of ocean.

Shane Connaughton is best known for co-writing the Oscar-winning Daniel Day Lewis picture My Left Foot. He also boasts a prolific catalogue of other writing credits from The Playboys (1992) and The Run of the Country (1995) – both starring Albert Finney – to the prize-winning A Border Station: a novel about a growing boy's relationship with his father on the bleak Ulster border. His latest book Big Parts is a comic novel about a grotesque and hilarious world presided over by an elderly showman with Ahab delusions.

Writer and Guardian film critic, Joe Queenan is one of the most popular humorists of our time. His acerbic riffs have skewered everything from baby boomers to sports fans. In his latest book Closing Time Queenan navigates more personal terrain: his own Irish-Catholic upbringing in a Philadelphia housing project, dominated by his violent yet ‘oddly charming’ father. At once hilarious and heartbreaking, it recounts how a series of surrogate fathers, and a furious love of books, precipitated his long flight into the wider world.

Join two keen-eyed observers of human foible for a lively round of wit, wisdom and cultural banter – from page to screen and stage.