“Sifting through so many great novels, to find the one that stands out over all…there really is something magic about it.”

Chris Morash is the Seamus Heaney Professor of Irish Writing in Trinity College Dublin, where he served as Vice-Provost of the university from 2016-19. His most recent book, Dublin: A Writer’s City will be published early in 2023. He is currently editing the Cambridge History of the Irish Novel. He was the 2022 Macgeorge Fellow at the University of Melbourne, and curated the Unseen Plays series for the Abbey Theatre (2021).

“Between Newfoundland women & Egyptian Mamluk emirs I meet African American detectives and an Oklahoma boy with a glint in his brain. The winner is clearly the readers at all those libraries that nominate a book.”

Gabriel Gbadamosi is an Irish and Nigerian poet, playwright and critic. His London novel Vauxhall won the Tibor Jones Pageturner Prize and Best International Novel at the Sharjah Book Fair. He was AHRC Creative and Performing Arts Fellow at the Pinter Centre, Goldsmiths in European and African performance; a Judith E. Wilson Fellow for creative writing at Cambridge University; and Writer in Residence at the Manchester Royal Exchange.

“I travel from XVth Century Constantinople to modern Japan without leaving my couch, and I emerge late, blinking…What’s for dinner? No idea, but let me tell you about the extraordinary book I’ve just read.”

Marie Hermet is a literary translator, reader and scout for French publishing houses. So far she has translated over sixty works of fiction and non-fiction from English, some by favourite Irish authors Donal Ryan, Roddy Doyle and Dermot Bolger. Marie also teaches translation and creative writing at the Université Paris Cité, where her curricula have a strong focus on Irish literature.

“I’m always telling students to read what’s interesting rather than what they know they’ll like and I thought it would be good for me to walk a path laid by others, but I hadn’t anticipated the wildness of the ride.”

Sarah Moss was born in Glasgow and grew up in northern England. She is the author of eight novels, including The Fell, Summerwater and Ghost Wall. She has BA, M. St. and D.Phil degrees in English Literature from Oxford University and taught at the universities of Kent, Exeter, Iceland and Warwick before moving to Dublin where she teaches on the MA and MFA in Creative Writing at UCD.

“To plunge oneself into such an ocean of literature is a joy and an education, but the process of reading so many wonderful books has also been deeply exhilarating.”

Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a bilingual poet, essayist and translator. Her prose début A Ghost in the Throat went on to be described as “powerful” (New York Times) and “captivatingly original” (The Guardian). It won the James Tait Black Prize and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, while the US edition was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a New York Times Notable Book. Doireann is also the author of six critical- ly-acclaimed books of poetry.

“I’d just like to say that even after more than four decades of reading, it is impossible not to be astonished by the books we are reading.”

Arunava Sinha translates fiction, non-fiction and poetry from Bengali to English, and from English to Bengali. Over seventy of his publications have been published so far. He has won several translation awards in India, and has been shortlisted for a number of international awards. He is the co-director of the Ashoka Centre for Translation.