Navigations: Megan Nolan

Unfortunately, due to unforeseen circumstances Lara Williams will be unable to attend this event.

We’re delighted to bring our festivities at Cúirt 2022 to a close with two of the most talented novelists of recent years. Lara Williams will read from her second novel, The Odyssey, a sharp satire set on a cruise liner, as Ingrid, a long-term employee, finds herself subject to a strange employee “mentorship” scheme that threatens to upend all she understands about her place in the world. In Megan Nolan’s debut novel, Acts of Desperation, our narrator has fallen into an affair with Ciaran, a handsome older poet, though neither seem capable of living up to the other’s expectations. The book is a deep, engrossing portrait of a toxic relationship, rendered with wit, insight and devastating vitality.

Lara Williams is a writer based in Manchester. Her novel Supper Club was published in Spring 2019 by Hamish Hamilton (UK) and Putnam & Sons (US). It won The Guardian’s Not The Booker prize and has been translated into six languages. Her novel The Odyssey will be published by Hamish Hamilton in Spring 2022.

Megan Nolan lives in London and was born in 1990 in Waterford. Her essays, fiction and reviews have been published in The New York Times, The White Review, The Sunday Times, The Village Voice, The Guardian and in the literary anthology, Winter Papers. She writes a fortnightly column for the New Statesman. Acts of Desperation is her first novel.