Author Interviews
Click play to listen to audio transcript of this post.
One of the perks of my job is meeting authors and interviewing them and over the past year I have had the privilege of talking to some of my favourite authors!
Last year I met Denise Mina – a Scottish author of primarily crime novels based around Edinburgh and Glasgow but she has also written historical fiction (Rizzio and Three Fires) as well as a new Philip Marlowe mystery The Second Murderer. She is a big fan of podcasts and blogs and her novel Confidence features a crime involving a vlogger.
Brian Bilston met up with me in Magherafelt last year too – he is a poet who found his niche during Covid, writing short humorous poems for Twitter (as it was then). His fan base increased massively during that time and he was eventually persuaded to perform his poems live on stage, touring the country to sold out venues. He was back in Belfast again this October in great form with lots of new poems.
Local author Sheena Wilkinson gave up her time to have a chat with me as well about an up and coming project.
First term at Fernside has now just been published . It is based on a fictitious Belfast girls boarding school in 1925 – it will appeal to fans of St Clare’s, Malory Towers and the Chalet School series.
She says it is ‘suitable for readers from 9-90’!
You can catch up with all three audio interviews on our YouTube channel.
Lucy Caldwell launched her new book of short stories Openings earlier in the year and I spent half and hour with her chatting about her writing, how it started and how it felt to win the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction last year for her novel These Days – a story based in Belfast during the Blitz of WW2.
The transcript of that interview is available here.
Will Dean has been a favourite author of mine since I read his Tuva Moodyson series based deep in a Swedish forest. Like Tuva, Will lives with his family in the forest having built his own house there a few years ago. He writes in a log cabin nearby and is often accompanied by his (very large) dog Bernie who, being very photogenic, has become nearly as famous as his owner through his social media presence! Tuva is a deaf journalist who finds herself embroiled in increasingly terrifying investigations. Look out for her next case in Ice Town – coming later in the year or catch up with some of the previous stories.
The transcript of the interview with Will is available here
I hope you were able to catch some of the interviews and podcasts released during this year’s BookWeekNI – My colleague Pete and I have had great fun chatting to so many great authors, local and beyond. We plan to continue releasing weekly Bookcited! podcasts from now on so make sure you like, follow and share to make sure that you don’t miss any!
We are truly Bookcited! about this and hope you enjoy listening as much as we enjoy making them!
In case you missed the Libraries NI Big Read - here's our author interview with Colm Tóibín:
