Belinda McKeon talks to Colm Tóibín

The Art of Reading is a monthly book club hosted by Colm Tóibín, the Laureate for Irish Fiction.

Each month, the Laureate meets a different library book club to discuss a book by an Irish writer, highlighting outstanding Irish writing and celebrating the reader and book clubs.

The selected titles celebrate work by contemporary Irish writers and the latest episode features Colm in conversation with Belinda McKeon about her novel, Solace.

“In her compelling debut novel, Solace,” Anna Fogarty wrote in The Irish Times in 2011, “Belinda McKeon succeeds in subtly reconfiguring and updating the archetypal story of a son’s quarrel with his father. In her hands, it becomes a profound and exacting conjuration with the pyscho-social shifts taking place in contemporary Ireland.”

Belinda McKeon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright. She is the author of the novels Solace (2011) and Tender (2015), and has had short fiction and non-fiction published in The Paris Review, Granta, Winter Papers, A Public Space, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in Dublin and New York, most recently at the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival, with Nora (Corn Exchange). She directs the new MA in Creative Writing at Maynooth University.

The Art of Reading Book Club is an initiative of the Arts Council and the Laureate for Irish Fiction, in partnership with Libraries Ireland. Find out more here.