They arrived in the city certain of who they would become-full of ambition, desire and possibility. But years later, the lives they imagined have shifted, and the pull of the past begins to unsettle everything they thought they knew. In Little Vanities , Sarah Gilmartin traces the tangled lives of three friends from their student days at Trinity to the compromises of adulthood-capturing the thrill, and the risk, of stepping beyond the roles we’ve been given. Pim Wangtechawat’s I Dreamed of You sweeps us into a luminous, time-bending story of first love and memory, where two students in Edinburgh discover that the past is never quite finished with us. Together, they discuss the intensity of early friendships, the allure of reinvention, and the gap between the lives we dream of and the ones we come to inhabit.
Sarah Gilmartin’s short stories have been published in The Dublin Review, The Tangerine and The Stinging Fly. She won the Máirtín Crawford Short Story Award in 2020. Her other novels are Dinner Party: A Tragedy and Service . She was the 2025 Arts Council Writer-in-Residence at Dublin City University. Pim Wangtechawat is a Thai-Chinese writer from Bangkok whose short stories, poems, and articles have been published in various magazines and journals such as The Mekong Review, The Nikkei Asian Review, and YesPoetry. Her debut, The Moon Represents My Heart was published in 2023.
In conversation with Margaret Kelleher, Professor and Chair of Anglo-Irish Literature & Drama, UCD.