Penguin Random House Ireland has today announced its inaugural crime writing festival, Dead in Dún Laoghaire, in partnership with The Irish Times. The festival will take place over one day on Saturday, July 22nd at the Pavilion Theatre in Dún Laoghaire.
With a stellar line-up of international bestsellers and home-grown talent, the festival will appeal to all fans of crime fiction.
Following her runaway global success with The Girl on the Train, Paula Hawkins will be discussing her hotly anticipated follow-up, Into the Water.
Kathy Reichs, international bestseller, forensic anthropologist and the inspiration behind the hit TV series Bones, will be launching her brand new standalone thriller, Two Nights, featuring a smart, tough, talented heroine whose thirst for justice stems from her own dark past.
John Banville and Stuart Neville will be discussing their new crime novels Prague Nights and Here and Gone and what it’s like to write under the pen names Benjamin Black and Haylen Beck. Another pair of prize-winners, bestsellers and book club favourites, Liz Nugent and Karen Perry, will be discussing their latest books along with the challenges of getting inside the head of a psychopath and exploring the dark worlds to which their novels take them.
Michael McLoughlin of Penguin Random House Ireland said: “We are absolutely thrilled to welcome a rare visit from two of the biggest international names in crime writing today and to celebrate the abundance of talent right here on our doorstep. It’s wonderful to be partnering with The Irish Times to launch Dead in Dún Laoghaire and we hope to see it become an immediate highlight of the Irish literary calendar.”
Martin Doyle of The Irish Times said: “Crime fiction is hugely popular with our readers, reflected in the columns of our crime-writing reviewers Declan Burke and Declan Hughes. We look forward to running features by the authors and interviews, starting this Saturday with Paula Hawkins.”
Tickets and full details for each event are available from the Pavilion Theatre box office and website. Look out for exclusive competition offers in the coming weeks for Irish Times subscribers and readers to attend Dead in Dún Laoghaire.
About the Authors
Paula Hawkins worked as a journalist for 15 years before turning her hand to fiction. Born and brought up in Zimbabwe, Paula moved to London in 1989 and has lived there ever since. Her first thriller, The Girl on the Train, has been a global phenomenon, selling almost 20 million copies worldwide. Published in over forty languages, it has been a No.1 bestseller around the world and was a No.1 box office hit film starring Emily Blunt. Into the Water is her second stand-alone thriller.
Kathy Reichs' first novel Déjà Dead catapulted her to fame when it became a New York Times bestseller, a Sunday Times bestseller and won the 1997 Ellis Award for Best First Novel. She is also a producer of the chilling hit TV series Bones. From teaching FBI agents how to detect and recover human remains, to separating and identifying commingled body parts in her Montreal lab, as one of only seventy-seven forensic anthropologists ever certified by the American Board of Forensic Anthropology, she has brought her own dramatic work experience to her mesmerising forensic thrillers. For years she consulted to the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in North Carolina, and continues to do so for the Laboratoire de Sciences Judiciaires et de Médecine Légale for the province of Québec. She has travelled to Rwanda to testify at the UN Tribunal on Genocide, and helped exhume a mass grave in Guatemala. As part of her work at JPAC she aided in the identification of war dead from World War II, Korea, and Southeast Asia.
Benjamin Black is the pen name of acclaimed author John Banville, who was born in Wexford, Ireland, in 1945. He is the author of fifteen novels, including The Sea, which won the 2005 Man Booker Prize. In 2013 he was awarded the Irish PEN Award for Outstanding Achievement in Irish Literature, and in 2014 the Quirke novels were adapted into a major BBC TV series. This is the seventh book in the acclaimed Quirke series.
Haylen Beck is the pen name of internationally prize-winning crime writer Stuart Neville. Writing under his own name, Stuart won the LA Times Book Prize for his debut novel and received critical acclaim for his Serena Flanagan detective series set in Belfast. His Haylen Beck novels are set in the US and inspired by his love of American crime writing.
Karen Perry is the pen name of crime writing duo Paul Perry and Karen Gillece who both live in Ireland. Their latest novel, Girl Unknown, was published last year and follows Only We Know and The Boy That Never Was which was selected for the Simon Mayo Radio 2 book club. All three were Sunday Times bestsellers.
Before becoming a full-time writer Liz Nugent worked in Irish film, theatre and television. In 2014 her first novel, Unravelling Oliver, was a Number One bestseller and won the Crime Fiction Prize in the 2014 Irish Book Awards. Her second novel, Lying in Wait, went straight to Number One in the Irish bestseller charts, remained there for nearly two months and won her a second IBA. She lives in Dublin with her husband.
