Paula Meehan and Gail McConnell

Award-winning poet and playwright Paula Meehan has published eight collections of poetry, including As If By Magic: Selected Poems (2021). She was Ireland Professor of Poetry 2013-2016 and her associated lectures Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them were published in 2016. Her latest work The Solace of Artemis was published in November 2023, both by Dedalus Press.

Gail McConnell is from Belfast. Her debut poetry book, The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins, 2021), about her father’s murder by the IRA, won The John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Award and The Christopher Ewart-Biggs Memorial Prize. She has also published Northern Irish Poetry and Theology, two poetry pamphlets – Fothermather and Fourteen. Gail is Reader in English at Queen’s University Belfast.