About the evening
The first Summer Reading Series event is Reality, with featured speaker Molly McCloskey. The event will be held at the Gutter Bookshop, Cow’s Lane, Temple Bar, Dublin 8, on Friday, April 23, from 19.00 to 21.00. Entry fee is €5. Free wine will be available. Molly McCloskey will speak for about fifteen minutes, and each reader will read for five minutes. Space is limited.

About Molly McCloskey

Molly McCloskey’s first work of non-fiction, A Perfect Circle of Light, will be published next year by Penguin Ireland.

Molly McCloskey was born in Philadelphia and grew up in Oregon. She moved to Ireland in 1989. Having spent ten years on the west coast of Ireland, she now resides in Dublin. She is the author of two short story collections – Solomon’s Seal (Phoenix House, 1997), and The Beautiful Changes (Lilliput Press, 2002). Her short stories have won a number of prizes, including Ireland’s RTE/Francis MacManus Award. She was also the recipient of the Ireland Fund of Monaco’s bursary and was Writer-in-Residence at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco.

Her first novel, Protection, was published by Penguin Ireland in 2005. Novelist Colum McCann called Protection “Funny, intelligent, empathetic and disquieting all at once, Protection is a fascinating debut novel. A comic dissection of contemporary Ireland from one of our finest writers.”

While living in Ireland, she has worked as a free-lance journalist, fiction writer and creative writing teacher, and is a regular contributor to the Irish Times and the Dublin Review. She was also co-founder, in 1996, of the Sligo Rape Crisis Centre. From 2006-2007, she worked for the United Nations in Kenya with Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs for Somalia.

For the last few years, she has been concentrating on nonfiction, writing essays on subjects ranging from basketball to basalt quarries in Vietnam to UN activities in Somalia.

About the readers

Adrian Duncan
Adrian Duncan studied and worked as a structural engineer for fifteen years before receiving his Chartership in 2007. He then returned to study fine art in IADT. He has subsequently exhibited work in solo and group shows in Ireland and Berlin. His written work has been published by Oh Francis, Paper Visual Art and Some Blind Alleys.

Gabriela Ailenei
Gabriela Ailenei was a regular contributor, as an essayist and translator, to the online journal Some Blind Alleys. Gabriela is originally from Romania but has been living in Dublin for the last fourteen years.

Helen Chandler
Helen Chandler is from Dublin and contributed fiction and essays to Some Blind Alleys. She completed an MA in Creative Writing at UCD in 2008 and subsequently won the Penguin Ireland award for the most promising writer in her graduating class.

Pauric Holleran
Pauric Holleran works with technology in third-level education. He has contributed several stories and essays to Some Blind Alleys. He lives in Dublin.

Robert Hopkins
Robert Hopkins is a thirty-eight-year-old tree surgeon who lives in Dublin, Ireland. He spent eight years working in the US as a climber in the tree care industry. He has published nonfiction in the Stinging Fly. He was a regular contributor to Some Blind Alleys.

Reality | Molly McCloskey | Friday night, April 23

Art | Brian Dillon | Saturday night, July 3

Death | Carlo Gébler | Friday night, September 3