Hinterland - The Podcast

Magic needs to happen on the first page of your novel or short story. How do you gain your readers' trust, spark their curiosity, and lead them into the world of your story? Through close reading and carefully crafted writing prompts, participants will explore ways to create a stand-out story opening. Roisín O Donnell was in conversation with Gerry Foley. Recorded live at Hinterland Festival...

In 2021 Donald Trump was suspended from Facebook for “using our platform to incite violent insurrection’   In January Mark Zuckerberg apologised for “too much censorship” and announced that he wanted to “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more”.  Where does this leave Europe? How will GDPR and the Digital Rights Act fare agai...

How Irish Music Conquered the World (mostly thanks to Horslips) In 1972 there were thousands of showbands in Ireland (or that’s how it seemed) cranking out covers. The 60s had bypassed Irish music, bar Van, Rory, Gilbert and Phil. But by 1977 the Rats and Lizzy were top of the British charts and we’d got our own rock festivals.  Tom Dunne credits Horslips, who introduced us to rock and roll one ba...

Our final dip into the 2024 Hinterland archive for Episode 8 - Stephen Walker. Peacemaker, politician, Nobel laureate: John Hume was a titan of Irish political history and a key architect of the Good Friday Agreement, bringing peace to Northern Ireland after decades of conflict. But who was the real John Hume? What sustained him during the bloody years of violence and how did he convince the IRA t...

Hinterland The Podcast returns to the archives of our 2024 Festival to bring you Episode 7. Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place is an intimate, personal history of the Northern Ireland conflict told through the testimony of the friends and families of more than 20 victims who died violently in Martin Doyle’s own rural parish in County Down. The author enjoys access that only a trusted local...

For Episode 6 we delve into the archives going back to Hinterland 2024. The fact that he was christened in the same Belfast church as George Best might suggest that George Hamilton was pre-destined to become the country’s leading TV soccer commentator. Either way, that’s precisely what happened. Anyone with even the vaguest interest in the great Irish male soccer squads of the 90s and 2000’s and t...

Richard O’Rawe is a Belfast author, playwright and a former IRA member who was press officer for the Provisional IRA in Long Kesh in 1981 during the IRA hunger strikes.  His controversial revelation that British terms for ending the hunger strike were accepted within Long Kesh, but rejected by the IRA leadership (in his book Blanketmen) put him at odds with many of his erstwhile Republican comrade...

Linda Ervine earned an MBE as a language rights activist in the somewhat unexpected location of unionist East Belfast. She is a speaker and fervent supporter of the Irish language and is the project lead of Turas which "aims to connect people from Protestant communities to their own history with the Irish language".  Turas is operated through the East Belfast Mission of the Methodist Chu...

Anne Enright is one of Ireland’s leading writers.  The author of eight novels, two books of short stories and many essays, she is a winner of the Man Booker Prize (2007), the Andrew Carnegie Medal for fiction (2012) and the Irish Novel of the Year (2007 and 2015).  Anne was the first Laureate for Irish Fiction (2015-2018) and she is Professor in Creative Writing in UCD.   Her most recent novel The...

Would the Good Friday agreement ever have happened had it not been for OperationChiffon? Peter Taylor’s book Operation Chiffon: the Secret Story of MI5 and MI6 and theRoad to Peace in Ireland takes us inside the top-secret intelligence operation whose roots go back to the bloodiest years of the Northern Ireland conflict in the early 1970s, involving officers from MI6 and, later in the 1990s, MI5....

In addition to her hilarious, pomposity-puncturing and (apparently) hourly interventions on Twitter/X, Annie West is one of the country’s most celebrated illustrators and cartoonists. Her unique style is instantly recognisable as is her stalwart support of her home county of Sligo and her passion for the love life of William Butler Yeats. Many of her interests have coalesced in the writing of The...