24 April,
Fiction / In Conversation /
Debut Fiction: Juliano Zaffino and Caragh Maxwell
Friday, 24 April 2026, 4:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €10/12
Book NowJuliano Zaffino’s The Steps is a novel that is at once deeply moving and eerily unsettling. With echoes of Virginia Woolf and Shirley Jackson, Zaffino uses psychological suspense to create an intimate and uncanny family drama.
Caragh Maxwell’s Sugartown is a remarkable Irish debut about growing up and moving backwards. When Saoirse moved to London, she was supposed to have left Ireland and her messy family dynamics behind for good. But when her five-year relationship ends, she has no choice but to return home.
Juliano is a writer, researcher and editor based near London. He founded YourShelf, a bespoke book-subscription service, in 2016. Over time, YourShelf expanded to encompass the YourShelf Podcast, where he interviewed a variety of writers from Lauren Groff to Doireann Ní Ghríofa, as well as the YourShelf Press, which published the author’s own poetry collection All Those Bodies And They’re Moving (2020), and Rebecca Lucy Taylor’s SELF ESTEEM (2021). The author also introduced Florence Welch to the Strasbourg dancing plague of 1616 through his poem ‘Strasbourg’, which inspired her 2022 album Dance Fever. The Steps is his first novel.
Caragh Maxwell is a writer living in Sligo town. In 2018 she decided to pursue her childhood dream of writing books. In 2023, she completed an MPhil. in Creative Writing at Trinity College Dublin. She has previously had essays, poems and stories published in The Irish Times, The Cormorant and other publications. Her writing focuses on otherness, womanhood, intergenerational trauma, and place. Sugartown, her debut novel, was published by Oneworld in September 2025. She was shortlisted for Newcomer of The Year at the 2025 An Post Irish Book Awards.
