09 April,
Fiction / Launch /
Debut Fiction: Garrett Carr and Roisín O’Donnell
Wednesday, 09 April 2025, 2:30pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €12.00 | €10.00
Book NowGarrett Carr’s The Boy from the Sea is the coming-of-age story of a young boy in a tight-knit fishing town. Told over two decades, this is an intimate but vivid portrayal of a family’s trials and triumphs and the restless boy at the centre of it all.
Roisín O’Donnell’s Nesting is a gripping, deeply emotional story, following a mother as she escapes coercive partner control and navigates the difficulties of the broken housing system in Dublin.
Garrett Carr is from Killybegs, the fishing town in Donegal where The Boy from the Sea is set. He teaches creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre, Queen’s University Belfast. His nonfiction work, The Rule of the Land: Walking Ireland’s Border, was a BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.
Roisín O’Donnell is an award-winning Irish author, born in Sheffield in 1983 and now living in County Meath. She won the An Post Irish Book Award for Short Story of the Year in 2018 and was shortlisted again in 2022. Her 2016 short story collection Wild Quiet was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize and shortlisted for the Kate O’Brien Award. O’Donnell’s fiction has appeared in The Stinging Fly, The Tangerine, and The Irish Times. Her debut novel Nesting, published in 2025, has been praised for its portrayal of coercive control and societal inequality, further cementing her place in contemporary Irish literature.
