Meet The Authors is a nice looking local lit event tomorrow at the MAC with Brummie of the Year contender Catherine O’Flynn and Nicola Monaghan talking about their work.
Catherine O’Flynn was born in Birmingham in 1970, where she grew up in and around her parents’ sweet shop before embarking on a career of curious jobs. Her first novel, What Was Lost, has bounded into the literary scene getting a nod from the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction and, at the time of writing is 8/1 odds on to scoop The Man Booker Prize. Celebrating Catherine’s insight into the absurdity of consumerism and urban dissatisfaction, the Literary Review observes, ‘O’Flynn is just the colleague you’d want to be stuck with in a dead-end job.’)
Nicola Monaghan has worked as a teacher, a financial analyst and a software guru. She now works part-time as Fellow of the National Academy of Writing, based at the University of Central England. Boyd Tonkin included Nicola in the Independent’s New Years Eve list of rising talent for 2006. Her first novel, The Killing Jar, was published in March 2006 to critical acclaim. It won the Authors’ Club Best First Novel Award and a Betty Trask Award, as well as being shortlisted for the Goss First Novel Prize and the Waverton Good Read.
Tickets are £5 and it starts at 7.30. Details.
Profile of Catherine on 4Talent – she’s a lovely woman: http://www.channel4.com/4talent/feature.jsp?id=6326