Boundless Storytelling
Discover two exceptional writers from Spain and Ireland, Andrés Barba and Audrey Magee, in this inaugural conversation of the ISLA Festival
We open the doors to this edition of the ISLA Festival welcoming two versatile writers who have built an exceptionally high-quality literary corpus: Andrés Barba and Audrey Magee. Andrés Barba's extensive work spans genres and formats, from novels to essays, from fictionalised biographies to fantasy novels, and from poetry to translation. Thomas Morris’s work has been described as fierce and tender, thrillling and unsettling without losing its sense of humor. We invite you to listen to these two authors who seem to dare to tackle anything, in conversation with fellow writer and journalist, Martin Doyle.
Andrés Barba is a writer from Spain. He gained recognition in 2001 with La hermana de Katia, followed by two novellas and six more novels that established him as one of the most important writers of his generation in Spain. He is also an author of essays and poetry, as well as the translator of over thirty authors into Spanish. His work has been translated into twenty-two languages. He lives in Argentina.
Thomas Morris’s debut story collection, We Don’t Know What We’re Doing, won the Wales Book of the Year, the Rhys Davies Trust Fiction Prize, and a Somerset Maugham Award. His stories have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and published and anthologised in Best European Fiction, and The Penguin Book of the Contemporary British Short Story. In 2023, he was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists. Born and raised in Caerphilly, South Wales, he lives now in Dublin, where for over a decade he worked as an editor for The Stinging Fly.
Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times, where he has worked since 2007. He is a former Editor of The Irish Post and The Times in London. He is the author of Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Own Place (Merrion Press, 2023) which was shortlisted for Irish Nonfiction Book of the Year. He has published essays and has edited A History of The Irish Post.
