FAMILY SECRETS IN FICTION

10:30 am - 11:30 am
| Location of Session: Launch SA Center
Adult Sessions

Start of Signing: 11:45 am
| Signing Location: Festival Marketplace

My Schedule

About the Event

Can we ever understand our own families? These new novels ask just that. In The Imagined Life by Andrew Porter, as Steve drives up the coast of California seeking out acquaintances from his past, each conversation reveals a layer of his family’s past – and forces Steven to confront his own present. In The Alternatives by Caoilinn Hughes, the brilliant Flattery sisters gather for the first time in years in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. These authors will grapple with family secrets, the fragility of nostalgia, and writing literary fiction.

About the Author

Photo Credit: Amitava Kumar

Caoilinn Hughes

Caoilinn Hughes is the author of Orchid & the Wasp, which won the Collyer Bristow Prize and was longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award, and The Wild Laughter, which won the Royal Society of Literature’s Encore Award and was longlisted for the International Dylan Thomas Prize. She was recently the Oscar Wilde Centre Writer Fellow at Trinity College Dublin, and was a Cullman Fellow at the NYPL for 2023-2024. Her latest novel is The Alternatives.

Photo Credit: Sarah E. Cooper

Andrew Porter

Andrew Porter is the author of the story collections The Disappeared and The Theory of Light and Matter and the novel In Between Days. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, he has received a Pushcart Prize, a James Michener/Copernicus Fellowship, and the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. His work has appeared in One Story, Ploughshares, American Short Fiction, Narrative, The Southern Review, and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. Currently, he teaches fiction writing and directs the creative writing program at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. His latest book is The Imagined Life: A Novel.

Moderator

S. Kirk Walsh

S. Kirk Walsh is the author of the national bestseller The Elephant of Belfast. She writes for the New York Times Book Review, Texas Highways, and elsewhere. For the past ten years, she has taught a nine-month fiction workshop for advanced writers in Austin. Walsh is also the founder of Austin Bat Cave, a nonprofit that provides free writing workshops for students in the greater Austin area. Currently, she is at work on a second novel about Detroit.