Happy Birthday Mrs. Dalloway: A Conference Celebrating 100 Years of Virginia Woolf’s Masterpiece

Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, which turns 100 this year, depicts a single day in June from the perspective of a number of characters. To mark the centenary, writer Belinda McKeon presents a day of panels and discussions in the Irish Writers Centre (Dublin) on Saturday 7 June 2025 from 11am to 3pm, with novelists, poets and essayists for whom Woolf’s novel remains a deeply important influence.

Join us for conversations about memory, expression, writing the city, and much else besides. The morning will start with tea and coffee and there will be an hour interval for lunch. The panelists will include Mary Cregan, Naoise Dolan, Emilie Pine, Belinda McKeon, Nuala O’Connor with more to be announced soon.

Mary Cregan is a lecturer in English literature at Barnard College in New York City. She holds an undergraduate degree from Middlebury College and a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. Her work has been published in a variety of publications, including The New York Times, The Irish Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Financial Times. The Scar is her first book.

Naoise Dolan is an Irish writer born in Dublin. She studied at Trinity College, followed by a master’s in Victorian literature at Oxford. She writes fiction, essays, criticism and features for publications including the London Review of Books, the Guardian and Vogue. Naoise’s debut novel Exciting Times was published by W&N in the UK and by Ecco in the US in 2020, and became a Sunday Times bestseller, widely translated and optioned for TV. She has been shortlisted and longlisted for several prizes, including the Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.

Belinda McKeon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright. She is the author of the novels Solace (2011) and Tender 2015), and has had short fiction and non-fiction published in The Paris Review, Granta, Winter Papers, A Public Space, The Stinging Fly and elsewhere. Her plays have been produced in Dublin and New York, most recently at the 2017 Dublin Theatre Festival, with Nora (Corn Exchange). After almost two decades in the US, where she taught at Rutgers University, she is now an Associate Professor in the English Department at Maynooth University, where she directs the MA in Creative Writing.

Nuala O’Connor was born in Dublin and lives in Galway. She graduated from Trinity College Dublin with a BA in the Irish language and from Dublin City University with an MA in Translation Studies. Her most recent novel is Seaborne, a re-telling of the life of Irish pirate Anne Bonny. It was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the 2024 Irish Book Awards and nominated for the Dublin Literary Award 2025. Nuala’s fifth poetry collection Menagerie will be published in 2025 by Arlen House. In late 2022, Nuala won the writing.ie Irish Short Story of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards for her story ‘This Small Giddy Life’, from the New Island anthology, A Little Unsteadily Into Light. Nuala’s fifth novel NORA (Harper Perennial/New Island, 2021), about Nora Barnacle, wife and muse to James Joyce, was published to critical acclaim in 2021 in the USA, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Croatia, and the Netherlands, and is forthcoming in Estonia and Poland. NORA was named as a Top 10 2021 historical novel by the New York Times and was the One Dublin One Book choice for 2022. Nuala curated the ‘Love, Says Bloom’ exhibition at MoLI, on the Joyce family, for #Ulysses100. She is editor at flash fiction e-journal Splonk.

Emilie Pine is Professor of Modern Drama at UCD School of English, Drama and Film, and author of the No.1 non-fiction bestseller Notes to Self. Emillie’s book Notes to Self has received international acclaim and won An Post Book of the Year in 2018. This series of essays addressed the things that we often don’t speak about, including fertility, feminism, sexual violence and depression. She went on to publish her first novel Ruth & Pen in 2022 and was named one of The Guardian’s 10 best debut novelists. In her recent book The Memory Marketplace: Witnessing Pain in Contemporary Irish and International theatre, she explores how memory is performed by analysing the significant body of contemporary Irish theatre that contends with its own culture and history, and focusing on the idea of witnesses, both as performers on stage and as members of the audience.

Access our building

Please note that this conference will be held in-person at the Irish Writers Centre (19 Parnell Square, Dublin 1). For information on accessibility, please see the ‘venue’ section of the Irish Writers Centre website.

The Irish Writers Centre is supported by the Arts Council of Ireland