Writing Queer Irish Womanhood: Katherine O’Donnell & Rosamund Taylor in Conversation

Join writer and academic Katherine O’Donnell in conversation with award-winning poet and writer Rosamund Taylor for an exploration of writing queer Irish Womanhood; past, present, and future. Katherine’s debut novel Slant (New Island Books) takes place between the peak of the 1980s/90s AIDS crisis and Ireland’s Marriage Referendum in 2015. Rosamund’s novel-in-verse Filly (Banshee Press) explores ‘sexual awakening, masochistic love, and the transformative possibilities of community’ (Banshee), in the tense atmosphere of an early-2000s Irish secondary school.

With works covering the span of three decades, these two writers are perfectly placed to uncover how Irish queer women’s stories have been unveiled; both at home and abroad.
This event will take place via Zoom and links will be sent out to attendees ahead of time. There will be a short audience Q&A at the end of the event.

This event is part of the Irish Writers Centre Pride 2026 programme, and we would like to thank Dublin City Council for their support in making this programming possible.

Katherine O’Donnell was born in Cork and spent her childhood on the naval base at Haulbowline island, attending a two-teacher school. She studied at University College Cork and later Boston College on a Fulbright Scholarship. She worked briefly as a journalist in RTÉ. Katherine is now Professor of the History of Ideas at UCD’s School of Philosophy. She has been an activist for many years, involved in, most notably, the Justice for Magdalenes Campaign and, more generally, with justice issues and the LGBTQ+ community. Katherine practices Buddhism and acupuncture and splits her time between Dublin, Cork and her converted camper van. Slant is her debut novel and it is published by New Island Books.

Rosamund Taylor’s debut collection, In Her Jaws (Banshee Press 2022), was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection. In 2025, she published Filly (Banshee Press), a novel-in-verse, which was selected as Cork’s One City One Book for 2026. Her work has been included in anthologies, such as He She They Us (PanMacmillan 2024), Queering the Green (2021), and she is one of three authors of Reflections Glimmer: Poems Exploring Ekphrasis (Tapsalteerie 2025). Her individual poems have won The Rialto/RSPB Nature and Place Poetry Prize (2025), The Telegraph Poetry Prize (2023), and The London Magazine Poetry Prize (2020).