On this month’s episode, host Nicole Flattery is joined by writer Caoilinn Hughes to read and discuss Emma Devlin’s short story, ‘The Gift’ originally published in Issue 49 Volume 2, Winter 2023-4. This episode was recorded in front of a live audience as part of Cúirt International Festival of Literature 2024. Please note: there are some brief moments of distortion in the recording of the conversation due to a technical fault with equipment we had on the day. Apologies for this.

Caoilinn Hughes is the author of The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize, and Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. She was recently the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and a Cullman Center Fellow at the New York Public Library. The Alternatives is her third novel.

Emma Devlin is a writer based in Belfast. Her work has featured in Banshee, The Irish Times and elsewhere. In 2019, she won the Benedict Kiely Short Story Competition, and in 2023 was shortlisted for the Mairtín Crawford Short Story Award.

Nicole Flattery is a writer and critic. Her story collection Show Them A Good Time, was published by The Stinging Fly and Bloomsbury in 2019. Her first novel, Nothing Special, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

The Stinging Fly Podcast invites writers to choose a story from the Stinging Fly archive to read and discuss. Previous episodes of the podcast can be found here. The podcast’s theme music is ‘Sale of Lakes’, by Divan. All of the Stinging Fly archive is available to subscribers.