Telling Truths : Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing

Evelyn Conlon is one of Ireland’s most important writers. She has published four collections of short stories, My Head is Opening (1987), Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour (1993), Telling: New and Selected Short Stories (2000) and Moving about the Place (2021) and four novels, Stars in the Daytime (1989), A Glassful of Letters (1998) Skin of Dreams (2003) and Not the Same Sky (2013). She has also edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology (2004).

Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing is the first book to provide a critical assessment of her work. Drawing on a variety of perspectives such as feminism, ethics, famine studies, mobility studies, translation studies, short fiction, narratology and historiographic metafiction, the essays gathered in this volume reveal that Conlon’s writing, characterised by sharp observation, insistently questions the predetermined course of female existence, explores alternative forms of freedom and ultimately reflects her commitment to seek and tell truths. The intersectional approach of the book is part of a current endeavour in Irish Studies to keep interrogating well established topics, to examine the elusiveness of others and to explore new boundaries through renewed epistemological and ethical positions.