Two Irish writers with a flair for the visual and a talent for expressing the unspeakable look deep into landscape in their latest novels.

Adrian Duncan and Sara Baume are both writing about escape – either imposed or chosen – and the landscapes that human beings sometimes disappear into. In Adrian’s The Geometer Lobachevsky, Nikolai Lobachevsky finds himself flees a death sentence from Leningrad, his only salvation a small island on the Shannon estuary. Seven Steeples sees Bell and Sigh, Sara’s newest protagonists, struggling to create a world of their own in the remoteness of the south-west of Ireland. Join these writers for a powerful conversation on the ways we live in the world – and what the world demands of us for that privilege.

The authors will be in conversation about their novels with poet and critic Gail McConnell, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast.

Adrian Duncan is an Irish visual artist and writer based in Berlin, whose novels include Love Notes from a German Building Site and A Sabbatical in Leipzig. He has also published a short story collection, Midfield Dynamo.

Sara Baume was born in Lancashire and grew up in Cork. She writes both fiction and creative non-fiction and has won, among other prizes, the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the Hennessy New Irish Writing Award.

Presented in partnership with the Irish Architectural Archive

‘The exact and the visionary … an original voice’ Colm Tóibín on Adrian Duncan

‘Baume’s writing is near-faultless: instinctively balanced, precise and often surprising’ – The Financial Times