Andrew O’Hagan and Brian Dillon
Date: Thursday 28th May 2026
Venue: Listowel Arms Hotel Main Room
Time: 6.30 PM
Elevating the Essay
Andrew O’Hagan and Brian Dillon are two exceptional writers who elevate the essay into a powerful and distinctive literary form.
Andrew O’Hagan’s On Friendship(Faber 2025)is a reflective collection of essays exploring the many facets of the friendships that make us great and the relationships that shaped his life, from schoolmates to the Stone Roses and Edna O’Brien. In these gorgeous personal reflections, O’Hagan illuminates the many ways and reasons that people come together, and how our lives are all the better because we do.
Brian Dillon presents Ambivalence (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2026), tracing his formative years in Dublin, following the early death of both his parents. It is at once a memoir of that city in the 1980s and 1990s, an uncynical portrait of the adolescent andearly-adult mind, and an intimate defence of radical thinking about literature and life, presented in vivid fragments.