Isabel Conway is a multi-award winning travel writer, the 2022 long haul Ireland Travel Extra Travel journalist of the year, and three-time past winner of the overall award. She has also been a winner and commended in the British Guild of Travel Writers annual awards in recent years. With a passion for discovering new places, people, and interesting experiences she has chronicled stand-out moments in her award-winning travel articles. In Varanasi India, she was intensely moved by a Ganges Hindu cremation, In poverty-stricken Malawi, she met feisty women who set up a co-op to feed their families. On a little boat on the same lake travelled by Dr David Livingstone in Zambia, watched by hippos and crocodiles, the outboard motor cut out. Oars luckily were aboard. Other memorable trips were following the Silk Road in remote Uzbekistan, enjoying a five-hour-long Georgian Supra feast, a 3 -day horse trek in the Canadian Rockies, and a surf lesson in Hawaii.
A fluent Dutch speaker, Isabel worked as a news and features writer for Irish and European print and broadcast media whilst based in the Netherlands, Sweden, and Belgium. Her Ireland outlets include the travel pages of The Business Post, Sunday Independent, Sunday Times, Irish Daily Mail, and Irish Examiner. She also contributes regularly to RTE One Radio World Report.
Isabel Conway’s talk: Some insights into the life and times of Ireland’s most celebrated travel writer, Lismore Co Waterford native the late Dervla Murphy, who pioneered a fearless and intrepid go-it-alone attitude to travel.
True to her convictions, with an almost resolute disregard for danger, her innate curiosity propelled Dervla Murphy to seek out the new and unknown, setting out from her home here in Lismore to undertake extraordinary journeys for more than half a century.
Details of this year’s festival programme can be found elsewhere on this website.
