Critic & cultural historian Clair Wills and journalist & Books Editor for the Irish Times Martin Doyle discuss the highly personal stories that drove them to document difficult moments from Ireland’s silenced past.

When Clair Wills was in her twenties, she discovered she had a cousin she had never met. What began as a search for the missing branches of her own family tree became Missing Persons, a memoir exploring the question – How could a whole family, a whole country, erase unmarried mothers and their children from history?

Growing up in the heart of both the Linen Triangle and the Murder Triangle, Martin Doyle lived alongside many who survived the violence of both the Troubles and the linen industry. In Dirty Linen, he takes a closer look at the communities that shaped him and the troubled past of the parish itself.

Together, Wills and Doyle shine a revealing light on the stories of the women, children, families, and communities that suffered in silence for too long.

Clair Wills is the author of Lovers and Strangers: An Immigrant History of Post-War Britain, which won the Irish Times International Non-Fiction Book of the Year and was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize, and That Neutral Island: A History of Ireland During the Second World War, which won the PEN Hessell-Tiltman History Prize, among others.

Martin Doyle is the Books Editor of the Irish Times. A former Editor of the Irish Post, he has worked in journalism for over three decades and is a regular contributor to the media and arts programming.

This event will be chaired by Caelainn Hogan.