JAN CARSON is a writer and community arts facilitator based in East Belfast. Her debut novel, Malcolm Orange Disappears, and short story collection, Children’s Children, were published by Liberties Press in Dublin. A micro-fiction collection, Postcard Stories was published by the Emma Press in 2017. Her novel The Fire Starters was published by Doubleday and subsequently won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. She has been shortlisted for the Sean O’Faolain Short Story Prize and in 2016 won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Prize. The Raptures (2022) was shortlisted for the An Post Novel of the Year and the Kerry Group Novel of the Year.
Her work has appeared in journals such as Banshee, The Tangerine, Winter Papers and Harper’s Bazaar and on BBC Radio 3 and 4. She is currently working on her first television screenplay for BBC3 and has recently presented a radio documentary for BBC Radio 4. In 2018 Jan was the Irish Writers Centre’s inaugural Roaming Writer in Residence on the trains of Ireland. She is the 2019 recipient of the Jack Harte Bursary. Jan has curated the CS Lewis Festival, the Hillsborough Festival of Literature and Ideas and the inaugural Belfast Lit Crawl.
She specialises in arts engagement with older and people living with dementia and has received funding through Queen’s University Belfast to carry out a research project into the representation of dementia in literature. She has facilitated creative writing workshops for the University of Ulster, Irish Writers Centre, Dublin, John Hewitt Summer School, West Cork Literary Festival and many other universities, festivals and organisations.
- Areas of expertise: literary fiction
- Location: Belfast
- Possible meeting place: Waterstones Belfast Cafe
