Please join us in The Creative Zone, Boole Library, UCC, for a very special literary evening with two incredible, atmospheric, hauntological authors of fiction and non-fiction: Issa Quincy + Jeff Young.

Tickets are free, but here is an Eventbrite link to secure a ticket.

The Writers

Issa Quincy is a British writer and the author of Absence. His fiction has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Guernica, The Sewanee Review, The Common, and Transition Magazine. His poetry has appeared in The London Magazine and The Atlantic. He is currently based in New Orleans.

Poet, performer, visual artist, dramatist and broadcaster, collaborator with artists and musicians.

Jeff Young's first book, Ghost Town, was shortlisted for the Portico and Costa Prizes. His second book, Wild Twin, which tells of his years travelling in Europe and living in Amsterdam squats, won the TLS Ackerley Biography Prize and was shortlisted for the Stanford Travel Book Award. He is currently trying – and failing – to write Lucid Dreamer, an alternative history of Liverpool counterculture. His novella, Latchkey, will be published in 2026 by the Berlin-based publisher Sacred Parasite.

The work

In Absence, Issa Quincy's elusive narrator is beguiled by a poem that returns to him in mysterious ways, echoing across the years. He recounts memories and impressions as they float fleetingly to the surface of his mind: an eccentric and beloved schoolteacher leaves behind a dark secret after his death; a woman lays the table for a son she knows will never return home; a young man, the pariah of his family, finds solidarity and the distant call of freedom in the letters of an estranged Aunt; a black and white photograph tells of another family, afflicted with generations of tragedy. These are some of the people and stories that haunt the pages of Absence. This hypnotic novel is a stirring evocation of the limitless depth of the present - a symphony subtly constructed out of the murmurs, memories and phantoms that add up to an ordinary human life.

In Wild Twin, one morning in the 1970s Jeff Young slips out of his parents home with the intention of hitch-hiking to Paris in search of a version of himself he calls the 'wild twin,' a shadow boy, a feral drifter. There he falls headlong into a fever dream of dive hotels, rough sleeping, getting lost, squats, violence, poverty, thieving, illness and madness. Journeying across Europe, from cathedrals to doss houses, from Red Light district to deportation and breakdown, finally Young returns to present-day Liverpool, caring for his dying father in the house he ran away from 50 years earlier, remembering the past with a man who can no longer remember.