Authors appearing at Hinterland Festival 2024

Anne Enright

Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s leading writers. The author of eight novels, two books of short stories and many essays, she is a winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), the Andrew Carnegie Medal for fiction (2012) and the Irish Novel of the Year (2007 and 2015). Anne was the first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018) and she is Professor in Creative Writing in UCD. Her most recent novel The Wren, The Wren won The Writers’ Prize for Fiction (2024).

Annie West

Born in 1961, Annie graduated from Dun Laoghaire College of Art & Design (IADT) in 1979 with a Diploma in Design for Communications. She began working in the Design Department at RTÉ and Tyne Tees Television and various independent TV productions for Channel Four. This was followed by a decade working in the Art Department on feature films in Ireland, Britain and America, working for Neil Jordan, George Pavlou, Gemma Jackson and many others. Around 1991 Annie left the Film & TV industry to concentrate on illustrating and cartooning full time.  She specialises in highly detailed pen and ink drawings with the emphasis on detail. She is particular and punctual, and can work to extremely tight deadlines. Annie has won a number of Awards: The Alfred Beit Award in 1993 & 1994, The NCEA Patent Practitioners’ Award 1994, and the Illustrators’ Guild Best Book Illustration Award 2003 & 2004. Annie's original illustrations, notes, sketches and scripts from her books have just this year been acquired by both the National Library of Ireland Special Collections Archive and Trinity College Library Special Collections department. Book Illustration Award 2003 & 2004. A selection of Annie’s work was recently added to the National Library of Ireland’s permanent Cartoon & Illustration Archive.

Arthur Mathews

Best known for his work as the co-creator of the legendary and much adored Father Ted, Arthur Mathews has also created and contributed to TV shows such as The Big Train, The All New AlexeiSayle Show, and Toast of London. His 2000 book Well Remembvered Days was a satire on the social and political story of Ireland in the 20th century. He comes to Hindsight@Hintertland with his first book of non-fiction, Walled by Hate:The Friends and Enemies of Kevin O’Higgins.

Bex Sheridan

Bex Sheridan is an artist, writer, designer and educator with a great love of animals. She is often asked to illustrate animals, from pet portraits to wildlife. As a child, Bex dreamed of having a house filled with animals when she grew up – which is what she now has! She and her husband Jay have their own mini-menagerie: it began with one rabbit and now there are also dogs, birds (of many kinds), and even a lizard! As a child, however, Bex thought farms were boring (yes, despite the love of animals). It wasn’t until visiting co-author of Irish Farm Animals, Glyn’s farm that she discovered how farm animals are no different from the pets we know and love!

Brian Gallagher

Brian Gallagher was born in Dublin. He is a full-time writer whose plays and short stories have been produced in Ireland, Britain and Canada. He has worked extensively in radio and television, writing many dramas and documentaries. Brian is the author of four adult novels. He has written many books for young readers, including: One Good Turn and Friend or Foe – both set in Dublin in 1916; Stormclouds, which takes place in Northern Ireland during the turbulent summer of 1969; Secrets and Shadows, a spy novel that begins with the North Strand bombings during the Second World War; Taking Sides, about the Irish Civil War; Across the Divide, set during the 1913 Lockout, Arrivals, a time-slip novel set between modern and early-twentieth-century Ontario; Pawns and its sequel, Spies, set during Ireland’s War of Independence; Resistance, an alternate history set in a Nazi-occupied Ireland; and Winds of Change, set during the Irish land wars. Brian lives with his family in Dublin.

Catriona Crowe

In addition to her many scholarly, journalistic and broadcasting achievements Catriona Crowe, former head of special projects at the National Archives of Ireland, is a member of the Royal Irish Academy and a member of numerous boards in the cultural sector, including Trinity Long Room Hub and the Dublin Theatre Festival. As a National Archives curator Catriona was the main driver of the project which led to the digitisation of the 1901 and 1911 Censuses.  She is also the editor of the book Dublin 1911.

Christy Mangan

Chief Superintendent Christy Mangan joined the Irish police force, An Garda Síochána, upon leaving school in 1980 and over the course of his forty year career, he was involved in more than 100 murder investigations. He twice received the Scott Medal for valour in the performance of his duties. Mangan established the Serious Crime Review Team in 2007, investigating historic cold cases. He retired in 2022. Cracking the Case is his first book.

Derek Landy

Derek Landy has written the Skulduggery Pleasant and Demon Road books, a few horror movies, and an increasing number of Marvel comics. He has many cats and one dog. He once saved a dozen orphans from a burning building. His favourite colour is probably blue.

Donna Mullan

Donna Mullan has worked as an ecologist for over thirty years and is a founding member of Bat Conservation Ireland and the Irish Environmental Network. She met her husband at a bat group meeting, and together they bought a farm in Meath and turned it into Golashane Nature Reserve. The reserve, home to several people and hundreds of plants, birds, mammals, insects and amphibians, has won several awards, including an EU Rural Inspiration award. Every week someone arrives at Donna’s door to ask how to create a nature reserve in their own home, and now her book Make your Home a Nature Reserve can help you too!

Edel Coffey

Edel Coffey is an Irish journalist and broadcaster. She has worked as a journalist and editor with the Sunday Tribune, and was editor of the Irish Independent Weekend Magazine, and Books Editor of the Irish Independent. She is a regular contributor to The Irish Times, Books Editor with The Gloss and a weekly columnist with the Irish Examiner. Her debut novel Breaking Point won the An Post Irish Book Award for Crime Fiction Book Of The Year and was a number one bestseller in Ireland.  In Her Place is her second novel.

Eileen Dunne

RTE Newscaster, Eileen Dunne, is the eldest of the late RTÉ GAA correspondent Mick Dunne’s three daughters. Born and raised in Clontarf, Dublin she studied Irish and French at UCD and after a year in France, came back to do a H.Dip (Masters in Education) and begin work as a radio continuity announcer in RTÉ. Eileen joined the RTÉ Newsroom in 1984 and has been involved in coverage of all the main news stories since. She has also presented programmes on RTÉ Lyric FM and on RTÉ Radio 1. A member of the Association of European Journalists, she served as International President from 2010 to 2014 (the first woman to hold the position). She is also a director of the Kennedy Summer school in New Ross. Eileen is married to the actor Macdara Ó Fátharta and they have one son, Cormac.

Elaine Feeney

Elaine Feeney, from Athenry in County Galway, is a poet, novelist and academic who was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2023 for her much-heralded novel How To Build a Boat. Elaine was shortlisted for the Folio Prize for her debut novel As You Were in 2020. She lectures at Galway University where she is creative director of the Tuam Oral History Project.

Emily Hourican

Emily Hourican is the author of eight novels, including three (The Glorious Guinness Girls; The Guinness Girls A Hint of Scandal and The Other Guinness Girl) fictionalised accounts of one of the country’s most famous families. In 2023 she turned her attention to the most famous ex-patriate Irish family with An Invitation to the Kennedys. Emily, in addition to writing fiction, is a journalist of long standing (editor of Himself and Dubliner magazines) and a writer and editor for the Sunday Independent. Emily received her early education in Brussels (and describes herself as ‘fluent in being a total Eurobrat’) before going to UCD to study History and English, followed by an MA in English.

Fiachna Ó Braonáin

Former busker (with Liam O’Maonlai as one half of the self-deprecatingly named Incomparable Benzini Brothers), co-founder of the incomparable Hothouse Flowers, Fiachna has also worked with Michelle Shocked (Artists Make Lousy Slaves) and with former Pogue, Cait O’Riordan and Hothouse Flower Dave Clarke in the band PreNup. He is also the presenter of any number of cool music programmes on RTÉ Radio 1 and is hopeful of negotiating a good exit package when his time comes.

George Hamilton

George Hamilton is a Belfast-born sports commentator and broadcaster who has been covering Irish, British and European soccer for decades. He has also worked on countless Olympic games as a rowing and athletics commentator and also includes hockey in his extensive repertoire. He also presents a twice weekly classical music programme (Hamilton Scores) on Lyric FM. The Nation Holds Its Breath is his memoir of a long and fascinating career in sports broadcasting.

Joanna Donnelly

Joanna Donnelly is a meteorologist and weather forecaster at Met Éireann and RTÉ. She is passionate about explaining the science behind the weather in language that is accessible for everyone. She previously wrote The Great Irish Weather Book. Joanna is married to fellow meteorologist Harm Luijkx and they live in Portmarnock with their three children. From Malin Head to Mizen Head, a Journey Around the Sea Area Forecast is her second book.

John MacKenna

John MacKenna is the author of twenty-four books; a winner of the Irish Times; Hennessy and C Day Lewis Awards and a winner of a Jacobs Radio Award for his documentaries with Leonard Cohen. He teaches creative writing at Maynooth University and at The Hedge School on the Moone.

John Quinn

John Quinn is a much-loved broadcaster and radio producer who was the recipient of numerous prestigious radio awards during his twenty-five years with RTÉ. He is also an accomplished author and writer of fiction and non-fiction, including Letters to Olive, an intimate and inspiring book, written as a tribute to his late wife. A skilful and engaging storyteller, his children’s novel, The Summer of Lily and Esme, was described as an instant classic and won the 1992 Bisto Children Book of the Year. John Quinn lives in Clarinbridge, Co. Galway.

Judy Irving

Judy Irving is a Sundance and Emmy-Award winning filmmaker whose theatrical credits include The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, a feature documentary about the relationship between a homeless street musician and a flock of wild parrots in San Francisco; Dark Circle, a personal film about the impact of the nuclear industry on residents of Colorado, California, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki; Pelican Dreams, about brown pelicans and those who know and love them; and Cold Refuge, about how swimming in San Francisco Bay mitigates life’s major challenges. In 2015 Judy was elected to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Documentary Branch. She lives on Telegraph Hill in San Francisco with her husband Mark Bittner and two rescue parrots from the wild flock.

Kate Doyle

Kate Doyle is an American writer based in Amsterdam. I MEANT IT ONCE is her first short story collection. With this sharp and witty debut collection, author Kate Doyle captures precisely that time of life when so many young women are caught in between, pre-occupied by nostalgia for past relationships – with friends, roommates, siblings – while trying to move forward into an uncertain future.

Kathleen Walkup

Kathleen Walkup is Professor Emerita at Mills College, where she held the inaugural Lovelace Family Endowed Chair in Book Art and taught classes in typography, letterpress printing, artists’ bookmaking and graduate seminars in book history and theory.  She began her printing career as part of a radical offset printing collective in Cambridge, Massachusetts, then co-founded both Five Tress Press and Peartree Printers, the first women’s letterpress trade press since the late 1800s in San Francisco. In 2019 a solo exhibition of her printing, Transitory Matter, was held at Mills College. Her most recent curatorial project is Possibilities: When Artists’ Books Were Young (San Francisco Center for the Book, 2022); In addition to her focus on the history of women in printing, she researches, speaks and writes on conceptual practice in artists’ books and on Ireland’s Cuala Press.

Ken Davis

Ken Davis is a native of Navan and a former regional newspaper journalist for over 34 years. After over two decades as editor of the Meath Chronicle, he established his own communications consultancy, Pinnacle Communications, providing public relations and content writing services to the business sector. ‘Of Wood & Wool’ is his first book.

Leon Diop

Leon Diop is a 28 year old mixed race man from Tallaght. Born to an Irish mother and a Senegalese father. He grew up in a mixed ethnic and religious household. He studied Psychology in Maynooth University where he served two years as Students' Union President. He is the founder of Black and Irish. An organisation striving to transform Ireland into a global leader in equality and inclusion. He is a host of the Black and Irish podcast with RTE. He currently serves on the boards of the Childhood Development Initiative, Tallaght and South Dublin County Partnership.

Leslie Cavendish

Leslie Cavendish left school at 15 years old, without any artistic qualifications to become a hairdresser. He worked for the iconic "'60s" hair stylist Vidal Sassoon. Leslie counted many of the stars of the day among his clients — including Keith Moon, Bee Gees, Dave Clark Five, James Hunt, Terry Stamp, Jane Asher, James Taylor and so many more — but the jewel in his career’s crown was styling perhaps the four most famous heads of hair in history: The Beatles. That relationship forms the basis of his book The Cutting Edge.

Liam McNiffe

Dr Liam Mc Niffe is an historian, author, former teacher Eureka Kells, and retired Principal  St. Patrick’s College Cavan. He lectured part-time in Maynooth University Education Department. He also lectures in Art History.  His publications include  A History of the Garda Síochána, Studies in Local History Meath (ed), A History of Williamstown Kells, Pounding Playing Praying, and his recently published Roots and Routes on Traveller history.

Linda Ervine

Linda Ervine earned an MBE as a language rights activist in the somewhat unexpected location of unionist East Belfast She is a speaker and fervent supporter of the Irish language and is the project lead of Turas which "aims to connect people from Protestant communities to their own history with the Irish language". Turas is operated through the East Belfast Mission of the Methodist Church in Ireland.

Luke Harding

Luke Harding is a Guardian journalist and foreign correspondent. From 2007-2011 he was based in Moscow until he was, in effect, expelled by the Putin government, as notable a badge of honour as a Pulitzer Prize or a knighthood. He has written numerous books, including volumes on Wikileaks and Julian Assange, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko and the revelations of Edward Snowden. His two most recent works are Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win (2017) and Shadow State: Murder, Mayhem and Russia’s Remaking of the West (2020). Since 2022 Luke has been based in Ukraine reporting on the outcome of the facilitation of the Putin regime that he highlighted in both those books.

Martin Doyle

Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times, where he has worked since 2007. He is a former Editor of The Irish Post in London, where he worked from 1992 to 2001, and also worked for The Times in London from 2001-2006. He is the author of Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Own Place (Merrion Press, 2023) which was shortlisted for Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year. He has essays in The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices, ed. Paul McVeigh (Unbound, 2021) and A Handbook of the Northern Ireland Troubles and peace process, eds. Laura McAtackney and Máirtín Ó Catháin (Routledge, 2023). He edited A History of The Irish Post in 2000 to mark the newspaper’s 30^th anniversary. He was also an extra in Father Ted.

Mary Kate O’Flanagan

Mary Kate O’Flanagan works by day as a story consultant for film and television but she comes alive at night when she tells her true-life stories on stage to an audience. Think, ‘The Moth’. Now she has turned a number of her funny, poignant, life-enhancing stories into a piece of theatre, the not to be missed, Making A Show of Myself. The show was a sell-out in its first run in November/December 2023. “An entertainer of the first rank” "Full of positivity … a life-affirming show” (Independent.ie)

Matthew Spangler

Matthew Spangler’s highly successful stage adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner has now toured the known world, with stops on London’s West End, the Dubai Opera House, and Gaiety Theatre in Dublin before opening on Broadway in 2022. Matthew has hosted numerous ‘adaptation sessions’ at Hinterland over the years, with authors like Zlata Filipovic (Zlata’s Diary), Kevin Barry (Beatlebone), Mary Manning/Sinead O’Brien (Striking Back), and Christy Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo). The last two have been adapted for stage by Matthew in collaboration with their authors and The Beekeeper of Aleppo toured the UK and Ireland earlier this year.

Myles Dungan

Myles Dungan is a writer, lecturer and broadcaster who currently presents the weekly RTÉ Radio 1 programme  The History Show. He is an Adjunct Lecturer in the UCD School of History and is the recipient of two Fulbright Awards. He has taught Irish history in UCD, Trinity College and the University of California, Berkeley.  He holds a PhD from Trinity College, Dublin and is the author of more than a dozen books on Irish and American history (including Four Killings, Conspiracy: Irish Political Trials, Irish Voices from the Great War, How the Irish Won the West and Mr. Parnell’s Rottweiler). He is also the author of two works for children, The Great Irish History Book and The Forgettables. His latest work for adults, Land is all that matters: the struggle that shaped Irish history, was published in May.

Natasha Mac a’Bháird

Natasha Mac A’Bháird  is a freelance writer and editor. Originally from Donegal, she now lives in Dublin. She is the author of many books for adults and children, including the Star Club series, and Shay Given and Sonia O’Sullivan in the Great Irish Sports Stars series. Her first two children’s books, Missing Ellen and Olanna’s Big Day, were both chosen for the White Ravens Collection. Natasha has always loved mysteries and boarding school stories, so she enjoyed writing a book that combined the two. To read more about Natasha’s books, visit natashamac.com

Niall Quinn

Niall Quinn is one of the most recognisable and celebrated former Ireland football internationals. As a player he scored 167 goals for Arsenal, Manchester City and Sunderland over a career that lasted for the better part of two decades. Between 1986 and 2002 he scored a further 21 goals for his country in 92 appearances. He was later part of a consortium which bought Sunderland AFC and he became the club's chairman from August 2006 till February 2012 gaining promotion to the Premier League in his first year where the club remained throughout his tenure. He has since worked as a football pundit namely on Sky Sports and Virgin Media. In 2003, he was awarded an honorary MBE and in 2023 he earned an MA in Irish Revolutionary history from Dublin City University studying the life of Oscar Traynor for his thesis.

Paddy Donnelly

Paddy Donnelly is an Irish author and illustrator living in Belgium who has illustrated many children's books including Here Be Dragons, Míp, Hom, Wolves in Helicopters and many more. He is author-illustrator of such popular picture books as Dodos Are Not Extinct, Fox & Son Tailers and The Vanishing Lake. His work has achieved international acclaim. He has been nominated twice for the Yoto Carnegie Medal for Illustration, shortlisted for the World Illustration Awards and the Irish Book Awards, longlisted for the UKLA Book Awards, among others, and in 2023 his books won at both the KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Awards and the Literacy Association of Ireland’s Biennial Children's Book Awards. Fox & Son Tailers has been translated into many languages, including Bulgarian, Catalan, Dutch, Estonian, French, Greek, Italian, Maltese, Romanian, Spanish, Turkish and Welsh.

Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc

Dr. Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc is a native of Meelick, Co. Clare but now lives in North Cork. He has a PhD from the University of Limerick and has published half a dozen books on the Irish Revolution of 1913 - 1923. His book Truce - Murder, Myth and the Last Days of the Irish War of Independence published in 2016 was based on his PHD thesis. His most recent work is The Disappeared: Forced Disappearances in Ireland 1798-1998. He is a regular contributor to History Ireland Magazine and RTÉ Radio.

Peter Murtagh

Peter Murtagh is an award-winning, Irish-born journalist and author. He spent almost 40 years in newspapers (working for The Irish Times and the Sunday Tribune in Ireland, and the Sunday Times and The Guardian in the UK) before retiring formally in 2019. He held several management positions across all titles, including chief editor, foreign editor, news editor, opinion editor and managing editor. As a reporter, he specialized in long form investigative pieces. He has received the Award for Outstanding Journalism in Ireland (1983), Reporter of the Year in the UK Press Awards (1986), and the News Brands Ireland award for Investigative Journalism (2016). He is the co-author (with Joe Joyce) of two books, The Boss – Charles J Haughey in Government (Poolbeg, 1983), and Blind Justice (Poolbeg 1984); The Rape of Greece – the king, the colonels and the resistance (Simon & Schuster, 1994), and, (with Natasha Murtagh), Buen Camino! – a father daughter journey from Croagh Patrick to Santiago de Compostela (Gill, 2011).

Peter Taylor

Peter Taylor is best known for his coverage of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’and for his investigation of Al Qaeda and Islamist extremism in the aftermath of 9/11 - added to his many investigations of the tobacco industry.  He is the recipient of multiple awards for his reporting, including a BAFTA special award for his career contribution to news and current affairs journalism and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Royal Television Society, both in 2014. He is the author of numerous books on political violence, including Beating the Terrorists: Interrogation at Omagh, Gough and Castlereagh (1980), the first of nine books related to the Irish conflict. His most recent work is Operation Chiffon: The Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and the Road to Peace in Ireland.

Richard O’Rawe

Richard O’Rawe is a Belfast author, playwright and a former IRA member who was press officer for the Provisional IRA in Long Kesh in 1981 during the IRA hunger strikes. His controversial revelation that British terms for ending the hunger strike were accepted within Long Kesh but rejected by the IRA leadership (in his book Blanketmen) put him at odds with many of his erstwhile Republican comrades. He is the author of two works of comic fiction featuring the memorable Ructions O’Hare. His most recent work Stakeknife's Dirty War: The Inside Story of Scappaticci, the IRA's Nutting Squad and the British Spooks Who Ran the War, made a timely appearance a few months before the recent interim Kenova report.

Robbyn Swann

Robbyn Swan is the author of five critically acclaimed non-fiction books spanning the worlds of intelligence, politics and crime. She has delivered scoops on FBI Director Hoover's sexuality, Richard Nixon's sabotage of the Vietnam peace talks and White House pill-popping, and Frank Sinatra's links to Mafia “boss of bosses” Lucky Luciano. Her most recent book, A Matter of Honor, written with her husband and long-time collaborator Anthony Summers, rewrote the history of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Summers and Swan have three children and live in County Waterford in a converted ferryman’s house on the River Blackwater.

Robert O’Byrne

Robert O’Byrne is a writer and lecturer specialising in the fine and decorative arts. He is the author of more than a dozen books, among them Luggala Days: The Story of a Guinness House and The Last Knight: A Tribute to Desmond Fitzgerald, 29th Knight of Glin. He has been a regular contributor to Apollo magazine, he Burlington Magazineand the Irish Arts Review and since 2012 has written an award-winning blog, The Irish Aesthete. A former vice president of the Irish Georgian Society and trustee of the Alfred Beit Foundation, he is currently a trustee of the Apollo Foundation.

Ronan McGreevy

Ronan McGreevy is a reporter and videographer with the Irish Times. He is the author of two books on Irish history, Wherever the Firing Line Extends: Ireland and the Western Front and Great Hatred: The Assassination of Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson MP. He is also the editor of Centenary: Ireland Remembers 1916, the official State volume recalling the commemorations of the Easter Rising of 1916.

Séamus Dooley

Séamus Dooley is Assistant General Secretary of the National Union of Journalists, UK, and Ireland, with specific responsibility for Ireland. He has extensive experience of working in the Irish print media, commencing his career in the Tullamore Tribune, and serving as Editor of the Roscommon Champion before joining the Irish Independent as a production journalist. He has been a full-time official of the NUJ for 25 years and has a deep knowledge of journalism and public service broadcasting across these islands. He is also the longest serving member of the Executive Committee of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions and an influential figure within the trade union movement and as a campaigner for equality.

 A founding member of the Clé Club he is an occasional contributor to Sunday Miscellany on RTÉ Radio 1 and is keenly interested in labour and social history.

Sinéad Gleeson

Sinéad Gleeson’s essay collection Constellations: Reflections from Life won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Dalkey Literary Award for Emerging Writer. She is the editor of four anthologies including The Art of the Glimpse and the award-winning The Long Gaze Back: An Anthology of Irish Women Writers, and The Glass Shore: Short Stories. Sinéad has engaged in multi-disciplinary collaborations with artists and musicians, including commissions from The Wellcome Collection, BBC and Frieze. In 2021, she worked with composer Stephen Shannon and artists Aideen Barry on By Slight Ligaments (Limerick City Gallery) and Alice Maher and Rachel Fallon on The Map / We Are The Map (Rua Red). She is co-editor with Kim Gordon of This Woman’s Work: Essays on Music. Her debut novel, Hagstone, will be published in April 2024 by 4^th Estate.

Stephen Walker

Stephen Walker has covered the politics of Northern Ireland for over thirty years as an award winning journalist with the BBC.

As a documentary maker with Spotlight, and a BBC Northern Ireland political correspondent he covered the Troubles, the Peace Process, the Good Friday Agreement and Brexit.

His work has been honoured by the Royal Television Society, the Irish Film and Television Awards and the Association of European Journalists. He was Northern Ireland Journalist of the Year in 2005 and is the author of four critically acclaimed books.

He wrote “Forgotten Soldiers”  in 2007 which told the story of Irish soldiers executed in World War One. The book was shortlisted for the Irish Book of the Year.

In 2011 he wrote “Hide and Seek” about the Kerry priest Monsignor O ‘ Flaherty and his life saving work in Nazi occupied Rome.

In 2015  “Ireland’s Call” was published which told the remarkable stories of Irish sportsmen in the Great War.

In 2023 Stephen left the BBC after 34 years and his book  “John Hume : The Persuader “ based on 100 interviews was published last October. Described by the Irish Times as “ the definitive biography of John Hume” it was a bestseller in December 2023.

Terence Dooley

Professor Terence Dooley, of Maynooth University specialises in Irish social and political history of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly the history of Irish country houses and the landed class; land and politics in independent Ireland; the working of the Irish Land Commission from 1881 to 1992; the revolutionary period 1916-23; and local history in Ireland. He teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules related to all of these areas of specialism at Maynooth University, where he is Head of Department and also Director of the Centre for the Study of Historical Irish Houses and Estates.

Tiffany Murray

Tiffany Murray's writing has appeared in Granta, the Guardian, the Telegraph, Sunday Times Style, GQ, Independent on Sunday and featured on BBC Radio 4. Her novels, Diamond Star Halo, Happy Accidents and Sugar Hall, have variously been shortlisted for the Wodehouse Bollinger Prize and received the Roger Deakin Award for nature writing. Tiffany has been a Hay Festival Fiction Fellow, a Fulbright scholar, a Senior Lecturer, a record company receptionist, and a dog walker in New York. My Family and Other Rock Stars is her memoir of a childhood spent listening to Horslips, Queen and Black Sabbath as they rehearse in her mother’s Vicarage. It’s also a story of of Rockfield Studios in Wales: her mother’s cooking, David Bowie, Lemmy, Geddy Lee, and looking for a father in all the wrong and the right places, too.

Tom Dunne

Tom Dunne has been front man with the Irish rock band, Something Happens (‘the band that forgot to break up’) for the better part of three decades now. He has also been a radio presenter for the last two decades - probably still best known for his seminal ‘Pet Sounds’ programme on Today FM. He’s only been coming to Hinterland to enthuse audiences about classic rock albums since 2017, but in 2027 we have no doubt that he’ll have been doing that for a decade as well.

Tom McEnery

For eight years, from 1983 to 1991, Tom McEnery, businessman and playwright, served as the Democratic party mayor of the capital of Silicon Valley, the city of San Jose . As well as his political and writing accomplishments (Swift Justice, A Statue for Ballybunion) he is also former owner of a professional ice hockey franchise (the San Jose Sharks) and was the first political inductee of the Silicon Valley Business Hall of Fame. He was also the first American to receive the Lord Mayor's Award in Dublin. In addition to sharing insights into the skills required to run one of the biggest US cities, Tom has also got plenty to say about the current state of American politics. His latest play The Springtime Assassin (written in collaboration with Myles Dungan deals with the life of Mick McDonnell, first head of the War of Independence ‘Squad’, the paid assassins of Michael Collins. Tom also has a History Masters (his dissertation was on Michael Collins).

Tommy Conlon

Tommy Conlon is an acclaimed sportswriter with the Sunday Independent. He is co-author, with Ronan McGreevy, of The Kidnapping, published in October 2023.

He has collaborated with a number of sports stars on their autobiographies, including the memoir by Munster and Ireland rugby legend Keith Earls, which won the An Post Sports Book of the Year award in 2021. From Ballinamore, Co. Leitrim, he lives in Limerick.

Tony Bucher

Tony Bucher grew up in Northern California and worked in a few startups in Silicon Valley and Asia during the dot-com era. He serves as President of the San Francisco Irish Literary and Historical Society, and regularly speaks on topics in California and Irish-American history at the Hinterland Festival and other august venues. He is descended from the notorious Gerritys of Duleek Co. Meath.