Born in 1967, Tim Butcher was on the staff of the Daily Telegraph from 1990 to 2009 serving as chief war correspondent, covering all major conflicts across the Balkans, Middle East and Africa. His first book, Blood River, an account of his 2004 journey through DR Congo overland from Lake Tanganyika and down the Congo River, reached Number 1 in the Sunday Times bestseller list and was the only non-fiction title in the Richard & Judy Book Club 2008. It was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize, the Dolman Best Travel Book Award and the Writers’ Guild of Great Britain Best Book award. Tim’s second book, Chasing the Devil, describes a 350 mile trek through Sierra Leone and Liberia following a trail blazed by Graham Greene and recounted in Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936). Tim is currently based in Cape Town with his family and is a frequent contributor to the BBC radio programme ‘From Our Own Correspondent’ and writes regularly for the international press.

Web Site: www.tim-butcher.com
Twitter: @timbobutcher

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.

Redmond O’Hanlon Redmond O’Hanlon is an explorer in the nineteenth-century mould. In addition to his four bestselling travel books, Into the Heart of Borneo, In Trouble Again, Congo Journey and Trawler, he has published scholarly work on nineteenth-century science and literature. For fifteen years he was the Natural History editor of the Times Literary Supplement. He lives outside Oxford with his wife and two children.

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.

George Alagiah joined the BBC in 1989 after seven years in print journalism with South Magazine. He has contributed to several British newspapers including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the Daily Express. He has spoken at the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society for Arts and at the Royal Overseas League. His appearances at literary festivals include Cheltenham, Keswick, Hay-on-Wye and London. George is well known for his ability as an event host and his great anecdotal delivery as an after dinner speaker.

George Alagiah joined the BBC’s Six O’Clock News in January 2003, which he co-presents with Sophie Raworth.

In March 2002, he launched BBC FOUR’s international news programme. Before going behind the studio desk, Alagiah was one of the BBC’s leading foreign correspondents, recognised throughout the industry for his reporting on some of the most significant events of the last decade. George is a specialist on Africa and the developing world and has reported on: trade in human organs in India; the murder of street children in Brazil; the civil war and famine in Somalia; the genocide in Rwanda and its aftermath; the plight of the marsh Arabs in southern Iraq; the civil wars in Afghanistan, Liberia and Sierra Leone; the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa; the fall of Mobutu Sese Seko in Zaire; the effects of Hurricane Mitch on Honduras; the Kosovan refugee crisis; the NATO liberation of Pristina; the international intervention in East Timor; the farm invasions in Zimbabwe; the intifada in the West Bank; and the aftermath of the terror attacks on New York.

George Alagiah has won several awards including: the Critics Award and the Golden Nymph Award at the Monte Carlo Television Festival (1992); award for Best International Report at the Royal Television Society (1993); commendation from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (1993); Amnesty International’s Best TV Journalist award (1994); the One World Broadcasting Trust award (1994); the James Cameron Memorial Trust award (1995); and the Bayeux Award for War Reporting (1996).

In 1998 he was voted Media Personality of the Year at the Ethnic Minority Media Awards. In 2000 he was part of the BBC team which collected a BAFTA award for its coverage of the Kosovo conflict.

George joined the BBC in 1989 after seven years in print journalism with South Magazine. He has contributed to several British newspapers including The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Independent and the Daily Express. He has spoken at the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society for Arts and at the Royal Overseas League. His appearances at literary festivals include Cheltenham, Keswick, Hay-on-Wye and London.

George Alagiah was born in Sri Lanka in November 1955. His primary education was in Ghana where his parents moved in 1961. He attended secondary school at St John’s College in Portsmouth, England and is a graduate of Durham University.

Publications:

• A Passage to Africa (Brown & Company – 2001)
• Shaking the Foundations (BBC)

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.

Órfhlaith Ní Chonaill was born in Tralee, Co. Kerry, in 1955. At the age of five, she became a poet. She attended the local primary and secondary school in Balloonagh, Tralee. Her first travels took her to Dublin where she studied Religious Education in the Mater Dei Institute. And, oh yes, there was a magical trip to Lismore! It was May and there were bluebells and wild garlic in the woods. During those years she was still writing poetry and songs. She taught for a year in Cork and a year in Dublin, but a questioning of religion had begun and her career in religious education ended.

In 1977, she returned to Dublin to marry Robin, the love of her life. They moved to Sligo in 1980 and the boys, Kevin and Rowan, were born. By then the need to write had become urgent, so Órfhlaith joined the Markievicz Writers’ Group with Dermot Healy in Sligo. Rowan, the baby at the time, was wired up to headphones and a stereo player for an hour each day while his mother pounded away on an old typewriter, reinventing herself as the writer she had always wanted to be. Her poems, short stories and interviews were published in Force 10 and other magazines. She attended night classes in St Angela’s College and earned a Certificate in Irish Literature in English from UCG.

The next part of the journey was the most exotic and life-changing. Órfhlaith and her family lived in Nairobi from March 1993 until November 1996. She was bowled over by the culture and by the local people with their openness, their (very Irish) sense of humour, their cheerfulness and their resilience, often in the face of great adversity. For the first time in her life, she had to redefine herself as a white woman. She found herself belonging, somehow, to the wrong tribe. The ghosts of coloniser and colonised were still thick in the air. The Kenyan experience found its first timid expression in a short story called The Laughing God.

Back in Ireland, she obtained an M. Phil (Creative Writing) from Trinity College Dublin (1998). During that year, a second African story, Kikuyu Grass, was published in the Sunday Tribune and short-listed for a Hennessy Award. These two stories later grew into the African novel, The Man With No Skin.

Órfhlaith went to Boston in 2001, to study with Pat Schneider, the creative writing guru, who developed the Amherst Writers & Artists’ creative writing workshop. The belief behind the method is that genius is hidden everywhere; it is in every person waiting to be evoked, enabled, supported and celebrated. She has been facilitating writing workshops in Sligo and around the country for seven years.

The Man With No Skin was published in Colorado in 2005. It was the recipient of IPPY (Independent Book Publishers’) and CIPA (Colorado Book Publishers’) Awards in the US in 2006. It was very well reviewed. Eoghan Harris, in his column in the Sunday Independent said that it ‘carries big ideas with the deceptive ease of JM Coetzee’s Disgrace, but has the same eye for local African colour as Alexander McCall smith in his comic classic, The No 1 Ladies Detective Agency’ Mark my words, this novel is going to go to Oprah and beyond.’

The Man With No Skin is available from Amazon.com and in bookshops in The USA. A distribution deal for Ireland is yet to be agreed.

Web Site: www.writersinksligo.com

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.

Maidhc Dainín Ó SéBeidh an scríbhneoir agus ceoltóir cáiliúil Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé ar dhuine de na haoichainteoirí a bheidh ag teacht go dtí an Lios Mór, Co Phort Láirge i mbliana don bhFéile Scríbhneoireachta Taistil Immrama. Beidh seisiún ‘Caint agus Comhrá’ i gcomhluadar Mhaidhc Dainín idir a 11.00r.n. agus 2.00i.n.ar an Satharn, 14 Meitheamh 2007 – saorchead isteach agus fáilte roimh chách.

Tá aithne mhór ar Mhaidhc Dainín Ó Sé ar fud na tíre seo de bharr a shaothar litríochta. Tá sé mar dhuine de phríomh-scríbhneoirí na Gaeilge agus tá naoi leabhar déag dá chuid foilsithe, ina measc tá Madraí na nOcht gCos, Is Glas Iad na Cnoic agus A Thig Ná Tit Orm, atá ar shiollabas na Gaeilge do scrúdú na hardteistiméireachta. Dírbheathaisnéis atá sa leabhar A Thig Ná Tit Orm ina insíonn Maidhc scéal a bheatha dúinn – a óige i gCorca Dhuibhne agus an saol a chaith sé i Sasana agus i Chicago, Meiriceá. Tá roinnt leabhar ficsean scrite aige chomh maith agus i 2006 bhain sé amach duais Oireachtais sa rannóg Ficsean Éadrom.

Tá aithne ar Mhaidhc Dainín chomh maith mar cheoltóir sna cúig cúigí agus thar lear. Tá ceol bainte as a bhosca ag aige i dteannta shárcheoltóirí na tíre seo – Joe Cooley agus Joe Burke ina measc – agus is i gcomhluadar na máistrí seo a thug sé a chuid ceoil chun foirfeachta. Ar ndóigh, beidh Maidhc agus a bhosca ceoil le cloisint thart ar thábhairní an Leasa Mhóir le linn na deireadh seachtaine chomh maith!

A man of many talents, Maidhc Dainín, as well as being a fine musician and singer, is a well-known author in his native Irish language, with nineteen books published so far, including Madraí na nOcht gCos and Is Glas Iad na Cnoic. His autobiography, A Thig Ná Tit Orm, which tells of his youth in West Kerry and the time he later spent in England and Chicago, USA, is studied by thousands of students each year as it is on the syllabus for the Leaving Certificate. He has also published a number of works of fiction, and in 2006 he won the Oireachtas prize in the Light Fiction category.

Maidhc Dainín Ó Sé is as versatile an artist as you will find. He is well-travelled and has brought his music from Chicago to west-Kerry’s Carrachán. He has played with and learned from the cream of Ireland’s musicians – including Joe Burke and Joe Cooley. Needless to say, where Maidhc goes, his button accordion goes also, and no doubt his music will be heard around and about Lismore during the weekend!

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.

Christina Lamb is one of Britain’s leading foreign correspondents and a bestselling author.  She has reported from most of the world’s hotspots but her particular passions are Afghanistan and Pakistan which she has covered since an unexpected wedding invitation led her to Karachi in 1987 when she was just 21. Within two years she had been named Young Journalist of the Year. Since then she has won numerous awards including five times being named Foreign Correspondent of the Year and Europe’s top war reporting prize, the Prix Bayeux. She was made an OBE in 2013.  Last year she won Amnesty International’s Newspaper Journalist of the Year for reporting from inside Libyan detention centres. Currently Chief Foreign Correspondent for the Sunday Times of London, her postings have included South Africa, Pakistan, Brazil and Washington and she has recently reported on the refugee crisis across Europe and camps for women enslaved by Boko Haram in Nigeria and ISIS in Iraq.

Web Site: www.christinalamb.net

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.

Donald Brady is a former County Librarian, historian and author of numerous historical books. He will speak on Gerald Villierstown Stuart (1869-1951): Author, Politician and Businessman.

Donald has delivered a paper at every festival since 2005. Donald never disappoints.

Donald Brady was born in Cavan and obtained his B.A. in History and English at Maynooth. He was County Librarian for County Waterford from 1982 until 2010. He served as director of the West Waterford Heritage Week in 1991 and 1992. He was the co-ordinator of Waterford County Council’s Famine Commemoration Programme and served on the National Committee charged with the protection of the Woodstown Viking Settlement.

He has edited major Waterford histories including, Hansard’s History of Waterford and Smith’s History of Waterford. Some of his more recent books are W.E.D. Allen & Other Essays, and A Study of the Life and Work of Regina Maria Roche.

Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.