An Asylum for my Affections

Niamh Campbell is the author of This Happy (2020), We Were Young (2022) and Make Strange (forthcoming with Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2026). She has won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and lives in County Clare.

Jessica Traynor is a poet and essayist. She is poetry editor at Banshee. Her first collection Liffey Swim was published by Dedalus Press in 2014 and shortlisted for the Strong/Shine Award. The Quick (Dedalus Press) followed in 2018 and was an Irish Times Book of the Year. Her third poetry collection, Pit Lullabies (Bloodaxe, 2022), was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, an Irish Times book of the year, and a Guardian Best Summer Read of 2022. It was shortlisted for the Yeats Society Sligo/ Irish Independent Poetry Prize. New Arcana (Bloodaxe, 2025) was an RTÉ and Irish Independent Book of the Year.

She is a 2025 EU Press Prize Laureate, was 2024 recipient of the Tundish Award from Field Day for contributions to the arts in Ireland, and the 2023 recipient of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry. Other awards include the Listowel Poetry Prize, the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary, and Hennessy New Writer of the Year. In 2016, she was named one of the Poetry Ireland Rising Generation of poets.

Molly Hennigan is a writer and editor whose work has featured in The Stinging Fly, Tolka, The Pig’s Back and more. Her first book The Celestial Realm was published in 2023 and explores the history of psychiatric incarceration in Ireland as it is linked to her own maternal lineage. The Celestial Realm was shortlisted for Newcomer of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards and was also shortlisted for the Royal Irish Academy’s Michel Déon Prize. She is the non-fiction editor at Banshee and is also the editor of a forthcoming anthology of Irish writing on Maeve Brennan An Asylum For My Affections: Sketches of Maeve Brennan. Molly is the 2025 Arts Council writer-in-residence at the University of Galway.