Ms Hilary Fannin

Hilary is an award-winning playwright, novelist, memoirist and newspaper columnist. Born in Dublin, where she still lives, she was writer in association at the Abbey Theatre in its centenary year, 2004. Her plays, including Mackerel Sky, Doldrum Bay, Famished Castle and an adaptation of Racine’s Phaedra, have been performed in Ireland, London, Europe and North America. In 2024, her ‘audacious’ adaptation of Maxim Gorky’s Children of the Sun was premiered at the Abbey. For a decade she wrote a weekly personal column for The Irish Times, having previously been the newspaper’s TV critic, and was named Irish Broadsheet Columnist of the Year in 2019. Her memoir, Hopscotch, was published to critical acclaim in 2015. Her first novel, The Weight of Love, was published in 2020, winning the John McGahern Award for debut Irish fiction. She was the 2021 Writer Fellow at the Oscar Wilde Centre, Trinity College Dublin. With the help of an Arts Council bursary, she is currently working on her second novel.