Niamh Campbell

Hot on the heel of the publication of her latest book, We Were Young, Niamh will share her thoughts, through the lens of her experience of reviews, reader response, and reception. The diverse, but connected themes will range across audience response, being an “Irish writer,” the current moment in realist fiction and the state of the publishing industry. Not to be missed.

Niamh Campbell won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award in 2020. Her first novel This Happy won the Rooney Prize for Irish Writing in 2021, and was nominated for the John McGahern Book Prize, the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award, the Kate O’Brien Award, and the An Post Irish Book of the Year Awards. She lecturers in creative writing at University College Dublin, and her short works of fiction and non-fiction can be found in the Dublin Review, Granta, The Stinging Fly, Tangerine, Banshee, Gorse, Holy Show, Tolka, Pig’s Back, and others.

Several lucky coincidences brought about Niamh Campbell’s return both to fiction and Dublin – most important among them when she was granted a Next Generation Artists’ Award by the Arts Council which enabled her to quit the job she disliked and focus on writing, the thing she’d always said she’d do if she didn’t get a job in academia. The result was the Rooney Award winning This Happy, her debut novel which was released around the same time that she won the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award, the richest prize for a single short story in the English language.

And now comes We Were Young which looks at post-recession Ireland through the lens of the cliquey art scene and tells the story of Cormac, a bisexual man who is nearing 40 and suddenly finds himself “leftover” as his friends all settle down. We Were Young continues Campbell’s exploration of how the past influences the future through a “tongue in cheek” view.