We bring together three outstanding writers to read aloud some of their more recent works. Authors will reveal their individual paradises and recommend some readings to immerse ourselves in the Irish and Hispanic literature.
Jan Carson, Northern Irish writer which book “The Fire Starters” has been translated into Spanish will make way to Chilean writer, Matías Celedón, author of “The Braniff Clan” (“El Clan Braniff”). Colombian poet, editor and translator, Andrea Cote, will close this event.
Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. Her debut novel Malcolm Orange Disappears and short story collection, Children’s Children, were published by Liberties Press, Dublin. A micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories was published by the Emma Press in 2017 and a second volume appeared in July 2020. Jan’s novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday in April 2019 and subsequently won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. It is currently shortlisted for the Blackwell’s Books Kitschies Prize for speculative fiction. Jan has also been shortlisted for the Dalkey Book Prize 2020, the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize and, in 2016, won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in journals such as Banshee, The Tangerine, Winter Papers and Harper’s Bazaar, and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. In 2018 Jan was the Irish Writers Centre’s inaugural Roaming Writer in Residence on the trains of Ireland. She was the 2019 recipient of the Jack Harte Bursary. Jan has curated the CS Lewis Festival, the Hillsborough Festival of Literature and Ideas and the inaugural Belfast Lit Crawl.
Matías Celedón (Santiago, Chile, 1981) is an award-winning novelist, journalist and screenwriter. Author of the novels La Filial (The Subsidiary, translated by Samuel Rutter), Trama y urdimbre, Buscanidos and El Clan Braniff, Celedón has worked as a screenwriter for documentary and fiction projects in Chile and Argentina. He lives in Santiago.
Andrea Cote-Botero is the author of the poetry collections: Puerto Calcinado (Port in Ashes, 2003), The Ruin that I name (2010), Chinatown 24/7 (2017) and En las Praderas del fin del mundo (Prairies at the End of the World). She has also published books of prose: A Nude Photographer: A Biography of Tina Modotti and Blanca Varela or Writing from Solitude. She has obtained the following recognitions: The National Prize of Poetry from the Colombian Universidad Externado (2003), the Puentes de Struga International Poetry Prize (2005) and the Città de Castrovillari Prize (2010) for the Italian edition of Port in Ashes. Her poems have been translated into English, French, German, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Macedonian, Arabic, Polish, Greek and Chinese. She has translated into Spanish poets Kahlil Gibran, Tracy K. Smith and Jericho Brown. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at the Bilingual M.F.A. at UTEP.