Ruth Gilligan

Ruth Gilligan is a novelist and academic from Dublin now based in the UK where she works as a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She has published five novels and multiple short stories, and was the youngest person ever to top the Irish bestsellers' list. Her most recent novel, The Butchers, won the 2021 Royal Society of Literature Ondaatje Prize, awarded to the book that best captures the 'spirit of a place'; it also won the Prix des Lecteurs at the 2024 LEC Festival. She writes regular literary reviews for The Guardian and Irish Independent, and works as an ambassador for the global storytelling charity Narrative 4.

Whilst at CCI she will be working on her new novel The Seagulls which follows four Drama School friends staging a play in 1990s Dublin, and three of them reuniting twenty years later to star in a production of the same show.

In partnership with the Littératures Européennes Cognac Festival: