When: Saturday, November 14 | 1:00 p.m.
Where: Georgetown University (exact location TBD)
Tickets: Free, with reservation
Join Dr. Coílín Parsons, Associate Professor of English and Director of Global Irish Studies at Georgetown University, for a conversation with writers Jan Carson and Lucy Caldwell and readings from the writers’ new works — Carson’s Few and Far Between and Caldwell’s Devotions — followed by a Q&A.
Few and Far Between | From the “deeply talented” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning writer Jan Carson comes an alternate history of Northern Ireland’s recent past where the last remaining residents of a haunted archipelago face imminent eviction from their home.
Devotions | "Throughout [Caldwell’s] eight stories, her touch is so light, her observations so perceptive, her dialogue chattering off the page, that she more than underscores her reputation as one of the best practitioners of the short-form craft." —Financial Times
Jan Carson is a Belfast based writer who has published four novels, three short story collections and two micro-fiction collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland, 2019. The Raptures was shortlisted for the An Post Irish Novel of the Year and Kerry Group Novel of the Year. Her writing has aired on BBC Radio 3 and 4 and RTE and has been translated into twenty languages worldwide. Jan was the Seamus Heaney Centre Fellow at Queen’s University Belfast in 2025, is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and has achieved the rank of Chevalier in the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in France. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between was published by Doubleday UK in April 2026 and Scribner in the US.
Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast and is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and four collections of short stories: Multitudes, Intimacies, Openings and most recently Devotions. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad’. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the 2022 E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters.
Cóilín Parsons is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Georgetown University. He is also a Director of Georgetown’s program in Global Irish Studies. Dr. Parsons’ academic interests include Irish literature, global modernisms, space and scale, cartography and post-colonial literature and theory. Cóilín is published in multiple academic journals, book chapters and review essays. He is a frequent and popular participant in varied academic and literary panels. He earned a Doctorate and Masters’ degrees from Columbia University in New York City and a Masters’ degree from Syracuse University. He was awarded double First-class Honours in English and History from National University of Ireland, Galway when he earned his B.A. Before coming to Georgetown in 2012, Cóilín taught at Columbia University in New York City and at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.
