Hilary A White | Tolka, Issue Six, April 2024 Sinéad Gleeson’s debut essay collection, Constellations, won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the 2019 Irish Book Awards and the inaugural Dalkey Literary Award for an emerging writer. It was part of a cultural moment in which brave and bold non-fiction written by women (see Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat) seemed woven through a period of great social change in Ireland. In May 2023, it was revealed that the award-winning writer, poet and anthologist was set to publish Hagstone, her debut novel, in spring 2024. Sinéad and I had crossed paths on the arts journalism circuit, and I had attended one of her essay-writing workshops. As a great many people will have experienced, she has been very supportive of my own tenuous beginnings in writing. We arranged a chat over Zoom about...

Catherine Hearn | Tolka, Web Only, July 2025 Having finished their new short story collection in almost one sitting, I was very glad to have the opportunity to speak with Liadan Ní Chuinn about their writing. Every One Still Here (2025) published by The Stinging Fly Press in March and Granta Books in July, has already been described by Kevin Power ‘as among the best Irish books of the 21st century’. The collection is tied together by themes of grief and haunting; the ways that the past is ever-present, as the title alludes towards. These are stories of fragile, palpable lives being played out in a supposedly post-Troubles North of Ireland. In ‘We All Go’ a young medical student grieves for his father and attempts to unearth fragments of the life he lived and the violence he endured at the hands of the British state. In ‘Russia’, complex issues of...

Jennifer Walshe | Tolka, Issue Three, July 2022 Imagine walking through the car park of a supermarket and seeing a baby sleeping on the back seat of an empty car on a very hot day. The baby looks like it’s barely been born; it has mottled skin; the squashed features babies have for the first few days. It looks to be sleeping, but it’s not moving properly. Something seems off. Is it breathing? Is it drugged? And why isn’t it in a car seat? It’s lying on a sheepskin. It should be in a car seat. Jesus Christ, what monster would leave a baby alone in a car? You need to sprint over to the security guard right now, ask them if they can break the window. You need to run screaming into the supermarket to page whoever owns the car! But . . . Oh, oh, oh. It’s not...

1. It is a ‘sentimental mishmash . . . muddily photographed in flat television style.’ Peter Nicholls, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction 2. It ‘invites you to have some wonderful dumb, callow fun.’ Pauline Kael 3. It was made for €12 million – even at the time a relatively small budget – and released on 4 June 1982, when I was not quite a year old. 4. I don’t remember the first time I saw it, though I can guess that it was probably around 1991, when I was ten. I must have watched it at least half a dozen times a year since then. I am now forty, which means that I have seen it some 180 times. If we factor in the period in the middle of my adolescence when I watched this film once a week – every Wednesday afternoon, when school finished early – we can...