24 – Olivia Fitzsimons

Welcome to Day 24 of our 2022 West Cork Literary Festival Advent Calendar. Our author today is Olivia Fitzsimons.

Olivia Fitzsimons is from Northern Ireland now living in Wicklow. She started writing at the close of 2017. Her debut novel, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop, was shortlisted for the 2022 Butler Literary Award. She is a 2023 recipient of the Centre Culturel Irlandais Paris/Literature Ireland Residency and a Dean Arts Studio Residency in Dublin for 2022/23. During the Irish Writers Centre Evolution Programme 2021 she was a teaching intern for a semester at National University Galway. Olivia has been awarded Literary grants from the Arts Council of Ireland and Northern Ireland, and her work has appeared in numerous publications including The Irish Times, The Stinging Fly, The Cormorant and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She holds a BA Hons in History from TCD and MA in Film from DIT. She reads for The Stinging Fly and is working on her second novel.

Olivia is reading an extract from The Quiet Whispers Never Stop which was published by John Murray Press in April 2022. Today’s video unlocked on 24th 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.