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 Claire-Louise Bennett, Mary Cregan, Naoise Dolan, Belinda McKeon, Nuala O’Connor and Emilie Pine.

TIMETABLE:

Welcome: 11.00 – 11.15am Join us for light refreshments and an opportunity to meet each other before we get started. (Tea, coffee and biscuits included) 

11.15am – 12.45pm: Dangerous to live even one day: the novel and the city: This morning conversation is with Woolf scholar Mary Cregan (Barnard College, NYC) and author of Ruth & Pen Emilie Pine, chaired by writer Belinda McKoen.

BREAK 12.45pm – 1.30pm

1.30pm – 3.00pm: Always giving parties to cover the silence: what novelists do with words: This afternoon panel discussion with author of Pond and Checkout 19, Claire-Louise Bennett, author of Exciting Times Naoise Dolan, author of six novels including Seaborne, Nuala O’Connor and writer Belinda McKoen.

Light refreshments will be available throughout the day.

Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond (Stinging Fly, 2015; Fitzcarraldo, 2015) and Checkout 19 (Jonathan Cape, 2021). Her forthcoming novel, Big Kiss, Bye-Bye, will be published by Fitzcarraldo in October 2025.

Mary Cregan teaches British and Irish literature at Barnard College in New York City, where she specializes in the nineteenth and twentieth century novel. She holds an undergraduate degree from Middlebury College and a Ph.D. from Columbia University. She is the author of The Scar, a memoir and cultural history of depressive illness (W. W. Norton & Lilliput Press, 2019) and is currently writing a book about the Irish revolutionary period, silence, and the legacy of her four grandparents, who left Ireland in the 1920s.

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 lives in Co. Galway. Her sixth novel Seaborne, about Irish-born pirate Anne Bonny, was nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and was shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2024 An Post Irish Book Awards. Her fifth poetry collection, Menagerie, was published by Arlen House in spring 2025.

Emilie Pine is a writer and university professor based in Dublin. Emilie’s work focuses on memory and performance, and she has published widely in these fields as a critic and academic. Emilie’s creative work includes the novel Ruth & Pen (winner of the Kate O’Brien Award, 2023) and the plays Good Sex and All Hardest of Woman. In non-fiction, Emilie’s first collection of essays was Notes to Self (an international bestseller & winner of the An Post Irish Book of the Year, 2018), which has been translated into 16 languages. She is currently working on a new collection of essays.

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