Dublin, One City, Many Stories - Video Two, The Writers' Roundtable

The Writers’ Round table is the second video in the series, Dublin, One City, Many Stories celebrating 15 years of Dublin as a UNESCO city of literature.

A practical resource for the emergent writer, the Writers’ Round table features writers Kevin Curran and Olivia Fitzsimons, playwright, Emmet Kirwan and poet, Victoria Kennefick in conversation with writer and journalist, Aoife Barry. You will hear the writers present an honest account of what inspires them to write, the craft of writing and remaining true to their work, and their identity as a writer in Ireland today.

Dublin, One City, Many Stories is also a promotion of the Irish Writers Centre’s work as an All-Ireland resource for writers at all stages of their careers.

Aoife Barry is a Dublin-based freelance arts journalist and broadcaster, and author of the bestselling non-fiction book Social Capital (HarperCollins Ireland), which was nominated for an Irish Book Award in 2023. Her essays and fiction have been published by ROPES journal, Banshee and ThiWurd and broadcast on Sunday Miscellany. Her bylines include the Sunday Times (where she is a weekly arts columnist), the Irish Times, the Irish Independent, the Business Post, The Journal and the Examiner. She features regularly on RTÉ and Today FM. Aoife has received Agility Award Funding from the Arts Council, and was selected by the Irish Writers Centre for its Evolution Programme 2023.

Kevin Curran's third novel, Youth, was published to critical acclaim by The Lilliput Press in 2023. It was an Irish Times, Sunday Independent & RTE Culture Best Book of 2023. It was also a Colm Toibin’s Laureate for Fiction's Book Club choice for 2024. The paperback edition was published February 2025. He has published two other novels, Beatsploitation (2013) and Citizens (2016). As well as writing non-fiction for the Guardian and the Observer, he has also published short stories, most notably in The Stinging Fly Best of 20 year anthology and the One Dublin, One Book Best of 21st century Dublin writing anthology. For over fifteen years he has been teaching in his home town in Balbriggan, Co Dublin

Olivia Fitzsimons is a writer from Northern Ireland. Her debut novel, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop (2022), was shortlisted for the Kate O'Brien and Butler Literary Awards, and was one of the Irish Examiner Books of the Year for 2022. She has been awarded Literature Bursaries from the Arts Council of Ireland and Northern Ireland, as well as residencies from Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris and The Dean Art Studios. Her fiction and essays have appeared in numerous publications, including The Stinging Fly, The Irish Times, Banshee, and broadcast on RTE and BBC Radio 4. She is a contributing editor at The Stinging Fly and commissions the This So-Called Writing Life essay series. She is working on her second novel and a short story collection.

Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet, editor and teacher. Her debut collection, Eat or We Both Starve (Carcanet Press, 2021), won the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize and the Dalkey Book Festival Emerging Writer of the Year Award. It was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, the Costa Poetry Book Award, Derek Walcott Prize for Poetry and the Butler Literary Prize. Her second collection, Egg/Shell (Carcanet Press, 2024) was a Poetry Book Society Choice for Spring 2024 and won the Farmgate Café National Poetry Award 2025. She is the 2025 Arts Council of Ireland/Trinity College Dublin Writer Fellow.

Emmet Kirwan is an award winning actor, playwright and poet from Tallaght in Dublin. He studied at the Samuel Beckett Centre Trinity College Dublin. As a writer Emmet’s play ‘Dublin Oldschool’ won the Stewart Parker Major trust award, it has played seven sell out runs in Project Arts Centre Dublin, toured internationally. Emmet wrote the four poetry sections of This is Pop Baby’s RIOT, which has played Vicar Street in Dublin and toured internationally to The Sydney theatre festival and Skirball New York. His poem ‘Heartbreak’ is taken from this show and was adapted in to a short film that been viewed over 2 million times on Facebook and Youtube combined and won an Irish Film and Television Award for Best Short Film. Other writing includes ‘Wild West’ a radio drama for BBC radio 4, which has been nominated for best radio drama award 2019 from the writers guild of Ireland. The short play ‘Queen of The Pyramids’ for Landmark Productions and Cork Midsummer festival’s ‘Theatre for One’ (2019.) He was commissioned by The Gate Theatre Dublin for their Late at The Gate initiative to respond to John Osborne’s ‘Look Back In Anger’. For this he wrote and performed two new spoken word poems ‘I love you woman’ & ‘Mam and Dad are worried’. He is also known for writing and starring in the RTE 2 comedy series Sarah and Steve for Accomplice Television. As well as writing the short films ‘Escape plans’ for Calipo Films and ‘Outside’ for Still films. The Last Partholonian which is a multi character speculative fiction play based on the first cycle of Irish mythology. It received project funding from the arts council for a performed reading of the first draft in 2018. Emmet’s play Straight To Video with Landmark Productions premiered at the Project Arts Centre to great acclaim in 2021. Following two sold-out runs in 2022, Emmet’s ACCENTS returned to the stage in 2025 for a tour of Ireland.Nominated for Best Soundscape at the Irish Times Theatre Awards in 2023, written by Emmet Kirwan and music composed by Eoin French and directed by Claire O’Reilly ACCENTS presents a powerful, poetic journey through a gentrified city.

The series was created by the Irish Writers Centre and funded by Dublin UNESCO city of literature, an office of Dublin City Libraries, Dublin City Council.

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