25 April,
Fiction / In Conversation /
Polly Barton and Susannah Dickey in Conversation
Saturday, 25 April 2026, 4:00pm
The Mick Lally Theatre / €10/12
Book NowPolly Barton’s What Am I, a Deer? asks what it means to lose yourself, as a young woman in Frankfurt set on reinvention, encounters a nice-eyed stranger and is catapulted into a dizzying, year-long whirlwind of obsession. Rendering the paradoxes of modern life in all its complexity, this novel is propulsive, titillating and bitingly funny.
Susannah Dickey’s Into the Wreck asks how you mourn someone you never really knew. With their father’s funeral only days away, Anna, Gemma and Matthew are consumed by their everyday concerns, from not-quite-exclusive boyfriends to overbearing mothers. With trademark wit and empathy, Susannah Dickey explores the knotty complexities of one family’s bonds.
Polly is a writer and Japanese literary translator. Her translations include Butter by Asako Yuzuki, Hunchback by Saou Ichikawa, Where the Wild Ladies Are and The Woman Dies by Aoko Matsuda, and Mild Vertigo by Mieko Kanai. She is the author of Fifty Sounds and Porn: An Oral History. Her debut novel What Am I, A Deer? comes out from Fitzcarraldo Editions in April.
Susannah is a writer from Derry. She is the author of Tennis Lessons (2020) and Common Decency (2022). Her third novel, Into The Wreck, will be published by Bloomsbury in April 2026. Her debut poetry collection, ISDAL, was a Guardian and Irish Times Book of the Year, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and won the inaugural PEN Heaney Prize and the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. She lives in Belfast.
