Northern Soul Roadshow Live

with Anna Burns at the Linen Hall Library, Belfast

Imagination must come first. Then peace, solitude, breath…

Anna Burns, March 2024

At the first live Northern Soul Roadshow showcase on 22 March 2024, special guest Anna Burns generously read from her unpublished work-in-progress, an effortlessly humorous and compelling narrative. She also shared heartening advice and encouragement for the NSR writers at this celebratory event.

The Northern Soul Roadshow writing community came together to celebrate the conclusion of the writing programme I curated and facilitated for the Irish Writers Centre and Arts Council for Northern Ireland. They shared pieces they’d worked on during the 6-week online programme to a full audience at the Linen Hall Library in Belfast. They also gathered their works into a limited edition booklet, including photographic and visual artwork from the writers. Copies are winging their way to the authors of the North that made up this year’s online panel of special guests:

Toby Buckley, Deirdre Cartmill, Emily Cooper, Kerri ní Dochartaigh, Shakeema Edwards, Maria Fusco, Byddi Lee, Tony Macaulay, Bernie McGill, Abby Oliveira, Pallavi Padma-Uday, and Dawn Watson.

Keep an eye/ear out in the coming weeks for podcasts featuring the Northern Soul Roadshow via Eat The Storms Podcast, thanks to editor-in-chief Damien Donnelly.

Keep an eye/ear out for the hard-working writers of Northern Soul Roadshow 2024. I’m sure you will hear more from them — literature is in very safe hands.

Anna Burns

Anna Burns FRSL is a multi-award winning writer whose novel Milkman won the 2018 Man Booker Prize, making her the first author from Northern Ireland to win the prize. Milkman also won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction 2018, the 2019 Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, the 2018/19 Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize, and the 2020 Dublin International Literary Award. Her 2001 debut No Bones was awarded the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. Anna was born in Belfast in 1962 and has published three novels, No Bones, Little Constructions, and Milkman, along with the novella, Mostly Hero. Anna was elected to Aosdana, the affiliation of creative artists in Ireland, in 2019, and elected to the Royal Society of Literature in 2021. She lives in Northern Ireland.