2026 Festival of Irish Writing

We are so excited to bring you another year of our Festival of Irish Writing October 2nd and 3rd in Uptown Butte.

This year’s Keynote Speaker is Billy O’Callaghan

Billy O’Callaghan, from Cork, Ireland, was born in 1974 and is the author of four short story collections – In Exile (Mercier, 2008); In Too Deep (Mercier, 2009); The Things We Lose, the Things We Leave Behind (New Island, 2013); and The Boatman and Other Stories (Jonathan Cape, 2020/Harper, 2021) – and four novels – The Dead House (O’Brien, 2017/Arcade, 2018); My Coney Island Baby (Jonathan Cape, 2019/Harper, 2020); Life Sentences (Jonathan Cape, 2021/Godine, 2022); and The Paper Man (Jonathan Cape & Godine, 2023). Winner of an Irish Book Award in 2013 and short-listed for the COSTA Short Story Award, the Littératures Européennes Cognac Prix des Lecteurs, Prix littéraire de UIAD, and the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award among various other honours, his work has been translated into nineteen languages and his short stories have appeared in literary journals and magazines around the world, including Agni, Fiction, the Fiddlehead, the Kenyon Review, Massachusetts Review,Narrative, Ploughshares, Salamander, the Saturday Evening Post, South Carolina Review, the Stinging Fly, the Tablet, the Threepenny Review and Winter Papers.

Please visit the Irish Writing Fest page on this site to learn all the details!