We are delighted to welcome Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin and Mícheál McCann for a conversation on their shared interest: the ordinary lives of saints.
Mícheál McCann’s newest poetry collection, Lives of the Saints , brings canonical saints into the realm of ordinary people. Saint Francis drifts during a spin class, Saint Bridget snoozes during Mass, an A&E doctor shoots the breeze with Saint Sebastian… While Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin’s novel Ordinary Saints , inspired by her own devout upbringing, tells the story of a queer woman who learns that her late brother may be made into a Catholic saint.
Join us for a conversation on their works, religion in the contemporary everyday, and perhaps a foray into a completely ordinary saintly life. All are welcome to attend.
Attendance is free but booking is essential.
ABOUT
NIAMH NÍ MHAOILEOIN is an Irish writer living and working in Edinburgh. In 2022, she won the PFD Queer Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize Discoveries award. Her work has appeared in Gutter , The New Statesman, The Irish Times , the Fierce Salvage anthology and elsewhere. Ordinary Saints is her debut novel.
MÍCHEÁL MCCANN is from Derry City. His poems have been published in The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review , Banshee, The Adrian Brinkerhoff Foundation. and anthologized in Queering the Green (Lifeboat Press, 2021) and Romance Options (Dedalus Press, 2023). He is a poetry critic for The Irish Times and lives and works in Belfast as a secondary school teacher. Devotion (2024) was his first collection. His second, Lives of the Saints , was published in May 2026