Tish Delaney
The Saint of Lost Things
Tish Delaney was born and brought up in Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. Like a lot of people of her generation, she left the sectarian violence behind by moving to England. After graduating from Manchester University, she moved to London and worked on various magazines and broadsheets as a reporter, reviewer and sub-editor. She left the Financial Times in 2014 to live in the Channel Islands to pursue her career as a writer.
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Her debut novel, Before My Actual Heart Breaks, won the 2022 Author Club’s Best First Novel Award. Her second book, The Saint of Lost Things, published in June 2022, was a 'Guardian Summer Read'.
Bog Gothic: writing contemporary Irish Gothic fiction
4.30pm - 5.30pm
Set in the Northern Ireland borderlands of the present, Delaney's novel is classic Irish 'bog gothic'. This darkly comic tale, laced with gothic tropes, tracks forwards and backwards in time, exploring the legacy of past trauna within a dysfunctional Catholic farming family. Secrets of the past stunt Lindy's emotional growth and taints her adult relationships, creating the destructive impulses that drive her behaviour, but also her survival.