The Irish Literary Society, London, with the support of the Dublin One City, One Book festival brings together a fascinating panel to discuss Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls Trilogy, as it is being celebrated in Dublin as the chosen festival book. We’re delighted to extend the consideration of O’Brien’s work to London, a city pivotal to her writing career and where the third book in the trilogy (Girls in Their Married Bliss) is set. 

Panel discussion with authors Helen Cullen and Paula McGrath, and academic Dr Sinéad Mooney, chaired by Dr Anne Goudsmit. 

Dr Anne Goudsmit left Ireland to study at Sussex University and at the Sorbonne before moving to London. Her early career was in Finance, when she worked at Citibank and subsequently at ITV. Anne wrote her PhD thesis on Northern Irish fiction at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, where she was a visiting lecturer. She is a member of the Irish Literary Society. She recently became a member of the board at the Irish Cultural Centre where she convenes a monthly Book Club.

Helen Cullen is an Irish writer living in London. She worked at RTÉ for seven years before moving to London in 2010. Her debut novel, The Lost Letters of William Woolf was published by Penguin in July 2018. Helen is now writing full-time and working on her second novel. She is also a contributor to the Irish Times newspaper and Sunday Times Magazine. Helen holds an M.A. Theatre Studies from UCD and is currently completing an M.A. English Literature at Brunel University. She was nominated as Best Newcomer in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018.

Dr Sinéad Mooney is a graduate of University College Cork and the University of Oxford. She is currently a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University, Leicester, where she teaches Irish literature and creative writing. Her monograph, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press) won the 2012 American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize, and her chapter on Edna O’Brien appeared in the recent in A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature, edited by Clíona O’Gallchóir and Heather Ingman. She is currently working on a study of Irish women’s modernism.