Hilary A White | Tolka, Issue Six, April 2024 Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, Constellations, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for an emerging writer. It was part of a cultural moment in which brave and bold non-fiction written by women (see Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat) seemed woven through a period of great social change in Ireland. In May 2023, it was revealed that the award-winning writer, poet and anthologist was set to publish Hagstone, her debut novel, in spring 2024. Sinéad and I had crossed paths on the arts journalism circuit, and I had attended one of her essay-writing workshops. As a great many people will have experienced, she has been very supportive of my own tenuous beginnings in writing. We arranged a chat over Zoom about...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Online Only, May 2025 Over the years, we’ve published a series of casual conversations between writers in Tolka. We have paired authors such as Colin Barrett and Nicole Flattery, Wendy Erskine and Louise Kennedy, as they have reflected on how they write their books and discuss the fundamental underpinnings of their art, as well as talking about what they’ve had for dinner and seen on the telly recently. We’re now delighted to publish a new conversation between Lucy Caldwell and Aimée Walsh. Lucy and Aimée first met in 2022, when Aimée took Lucy’s Faber Academy course on the short story, and they’ve stayed in touch ever since. Lucy and Aimée are both writers from Belfast. Lucy is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories published by Faber: Multitudes (2016) and Intimacies (2021) and, most recently, Openings (2024). Her most recent novel, These...

Mark O’Connell | Tolka, Issue Four, June 2023 For nine years, from 2013 until the start of this year, I lived with my family in Stoneybatter. Most mornings, if it wasn’t raining, I would walk my son to school on the far side of the Liffey. As we crossed the quays my attention would often be drawn towards a four-storey red-brick building, which was the only remaining Georgian house in a row of humbler buildings – a low, squat car-upholstery business on one side and a block of modern apartments on the other. Always the house was unlit from within, and unoccupied. Its windows were thickly grimed with dirt from the heavy passing traffic. The granite steps up to its arched and fan-lit front door were sprouting grass and weeds. When I looked down over its railings into its basement entrance, I often saw piles of miscellaneous urban flotsam –...

Liam Harrison | Tolka, Web Only, April 2022 Rob Doyle’s latest book, Autobibliography (2021), originated from an Irish Times book column, where he was asked to write once a week throughout 2019 about a pre-twenty-first-century work of literature, at no more than 340 words per book. He describes it as ‘the book chat equivalent of haiku condensation’. The other half of Autobibliography is a mirror text of sorts, written during lockdown in 2020, and are reflections upon these reflections on books, spanning many different kinds of writing, including memoir, anecdotes, travelogue and other, less categorisable forms. Doyle is the author of the short-story collection This Is the Ritual (2016), as well as the novels Threshold (2020) and Here are the Young Men (2014), which has recently been made into a film. Liam Harrison (LH): What was the experience of writing the shadowy half of Autobibliography, which came after writing your...