Friday 30th May | 7pm | Basement Gallery
Tickets: Free, no booking required

Jaki McCarrick’s debut poetry collection, Sweeney as a Girl, opens with the title poem which recasts the crazed king of Irish legend as a modern-day female struggling to cope with the distractions and pressures of our age. London-born, and raised there and in Co. Louth, again and again McCarrick is drawn to the exploration of difference, of otherness, her keen eye seeing never just place alone, for instance, but glimpses of the longer narratives (intact or otherwise) of connection and belonging.

Jaki McCarrick is a writer of plays, poetry and fiction, and the winner of the Papatango Prize for New Writing for her play Leopoldville. Her play Belfast Girls was developed at the National Theatre Studio, London and has been staged numerous times internationally including as An Táin Arts Centre’s 10 year celebrations in 2024. Her short story collection The Scattering was shortlisted for the 2014 Edge Hill Prize and includes the Wasafiri Prize- winning story, ‘The Visit’. She was Writer in Residence at the Centre Cultural Irlandais in Paris (2013), and at the University of Leuven, Belgium