Join Jan Carson and Lucy Caldwell as they discuss Quickly, While They Still Have Horses – sixteen stories of youth and innocence, age and experience – and all the spaces in between.

Jan Carson introduces us to worlds and characters that feel real enough to touch. All of life is here: the thrill of growing up, the grief when youth is over; first love, mature love, parenthood and loss – all shot through with profound compassion, warm wit, and boundless imagination.

In ‘A Certain Degree of Ownership’, a distracted couple on a beach fail to notice their baby crawling perilously towards the sea. In ‘Troubling the Water’, a rumour spreads at a public swimming pool and chaos ensues. In ‘Fair Play’ a dishevelled father loses his two sons in an adventure park.

Every so often, an irresistible suggestion of the other world will surprise and delight, reaffirming Carson as a thrillingly original and audacious talent, and making Quickly, While They Still Have Horses the perfect introduction for readers new to her work.

About our guests:

Jan Carson FRSL is a writer from Northern Ireland. Her books include Malcolm Orange Disappears, Children’s Children, Postcard Stories, The Fire Starters – which won the EU Prize for Literature in 2019 – and The Raptures, which was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year 2022 and the Kerry Group Novel of the Year. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2023.

Lucy Caldwell FRSL was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three collections of short stories: Openings, Multitudes and Intimacies. Lucy is the winner of multiple awards, including the BBC National Short Story Award 2021 for All the People Were Mean and Bad; the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Prize and the Dylan Thomas Prize for her novel The Meeting Point. Lucy is the winner of the 2022 E. M. Forster Award and was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018.