Clara Kumagai and John Patrick McHugh in conversation at UCC Library In-Person
Please join us in The Creative Zone, Boole Library, UCC, for a very special literary evening with two of Ireland's most exciting young novelists: Clara Kumagai + John Patrick McHugh presented by UCC School of English & Digital Humanities.
Tickets are free, but here is an Eventbrite link to secure a ticket.
THE WRITERS
Clara Kumagai is from Canada, Japan and Ireland. Her debut novel, Catfish Rolling, received the 2024 KPMG Children’s Books Ireland Book of the Year Award. Her second novel, Songs for Ghosts, was named one of the Best Irish Books of 2025 by Children’s Books Ireland, and has been longlisted for the 2026 YOTO Carnegie Medal for Writing.
John Patrick McHugh is from Galway. His work has appeared in the Stinging Fly, Winter Papers, Banshee, Tolka, and Granta and been broadcast on BBC Radio 3. He is the author of the short story collection Pure Gold and the novel Fun and Games.
THE WORK
Songs For Ghosts is full of longing, love and heartbreak, inspired by Puccini's Madame Butterfly. When Japanese-American teenager, Adam, discovers a diary in his attic, he is enthralled by its account of a young Japanese woman's life. A hundred years separate them yet she, like Adam, is caught between cultures, relationships and heartbreak. She also writes of the ghosts that have begun to seek her out, which Adam dismisses as fantasy – until he too, begins to be haunted. It leads him to Nagasaki, trying to solve the mystery of the diary, and his own identity.
In Fun and Games, seventeen-year-old John Masterson is experiencing his last summer on the small island where he has grown up. As John joins the local senior football team, gets caught up in fights and parties, and embarks on a tentative relationship with his slightly older co-worker Amber that he feels both proud and ashamed of, he can almost pretend that this summer will last forever. But soon John must face up to the choices before him: to stay or leave, to stand out or fit in, and whether to love and let himself be loved, despite or perhaps because of, the flaws that make us all human.