Join Anna Carey (Our Song) and Sylvia Leatham (Chaos Theory) in conversation with Prof. Paige Reynolds (curator of MoLI’s Happy Ever After: Falling in Love with Irish Romance Fiction exhibition) in a discussion of their recently published works of Irish romance fiction.
In a live recording for a forthcoming RadioMoLI podcast, the event will consider the novels themselves, examining how their books depict love and relationships in present-day Ireland while also thinking about how they fit into a longer tradition of Irish romance.
The panel will discuss how these writers play with the genre's familiar narrative satisfactions, including the second-chance romance and the love triangle, and will dig into other fascinating subjects: among them, the current state of marketing romance and what it means to write your first romance in mid-career.
Presented with the support of the Edward Callahan Support Fund for Irish Studies and the J. D. Power Center for the Liberal Arts at the College of the Holy Cross.
Anna Carey is an Irish Book Award-winning novelist, journalist, editor and scriptwriter. She is the author of seven acclaimed novels for young adults and her debut novel The Real Rebecca won the Senior Children’s Book of the Year prize at the 2011 Irish Book Awards. The Boldness of Betty was shortlisted for the same award in 2020. Her drama podcast The Famine Monologues was released by RTÉ in 2021 and her play The Making of Mollie was staged in 2024 at the Ark Children’s Cultural Centre in Dublin. Our Song is her first book for adult readers. She is married to her former bandmate Patrick Freyne and lives in Dublin.
Sylvia Leatham is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. Her books seek out the human heart behind global issues or technological change, finding comedy in the everyday and romance in unusual places. While she has a passion for science, human relationships are what really fascinate her. Chaos Theory, her debut novel (published September 2025), was the first in a two-book deal with Storm Publishing, brokered by Laura Bennett of the Liverpool Literary Agency. Prior to publication, her debut novel was shortlisted for The Letter Review manuscript prize in the US, and for the Watson Little Indie Novella novel prize in the UK. The first chapter was shortlisted for the Retreat West First Chapter competition. The book was also longlisted for the Mslexia novel prize and for the Novel London Literary prize.
Paige Reynolds is Professor of English at the College of the Holy Cross. She is author of Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode and Modernism, Drama, and the Audience for Irish Spectacle, and is the editor of Modernist Afterlives in Irish Literature and Culture, The New Irish Studies and Irish Literature in Transition, Volume 6, 1980-2020 (with Eric Falci).
