22 - Lauren Foley - West Cork Music

The cover of Lauren Foley's book is beige in colour. There is a painting of a naked woman seen from behind sitting on an artist's plinth, as if she is posing for artists in a life drawing class. The title of the book, Polluted Sex, is in blue writing

Welcome to Day 22 of our 2022 West Cork Literary Festival Advent Calendar. Our author today is Lauren Foley.

Lauren Foley (she/her) is Irish/Australian and a Next Generation Artist in Literature with the Arts Council of Ireland. Lauren is bisexual, chronically ill and disabled. She has a plethora of health issues including: Lupus (SLE), endometriosis and mental illness. The majority of her writing is dictated. Lauren won the inaugural Overland Neilma Sidney Short Story Prize and The Los Angeles Review, Creative Nonfiction Award. Her work has been shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards and is published in the critically acclaimed The Art of the Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories selected by Sinéad Gleeson. She is an Editorial Assistant with Overland and a Guest Editor with The Masters Review. Polluted Sex – Lauren’s debut short story collection – is published by Influx Press in the UK and Ireland and is forthcoming from MidnightSun Publishing in Australia and New Zealand in 2023. She is currently longlisted for the The Barbellion Prize 2022.

Lauren is reading an extract from Polluted Sex which was published by Influx Press in April 2022. Today’s video unlocked on 22nd December 2022 and may be viewed below. Closed caption subtitles are available and may be turned on or off. Press the play button or click “Watch on Youtube” to watch it in full screen.

About our WCLF Literary Advent Calendar

2022 was another wonderful year for Irish writing and so many incredible books by Irish authors and authors living in Ireland were released this year. We’re delighted to bring you a small selection of these authors and we’ve invited twenty-four writers to submit a short video reading from their new books. Our selection is an attempt to show the wide range of Irish writing and in particular to focus on writers whose books we feel deserve more attention and those who were not previously featured in WCLF 2022 events. We hope that you will enjoy the chance to hear these writers reading their own work and to discover some new books for your reading piles.