PICTURES: Words & Wine opens Dromineer Nenagh Literary Festival with Claire Hennessy and Paul Perry

The Dromineer Nenagh Literary Festival opened on Thursday, October 9, with Words & Wine, an intimate evening at The Wine Buff in Nenagh featuring writers Claire Hennessy and Paul Perry, both published by Doire Press. The event was also sponsored by The Wine Buff.

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Dublin-based writer, editor and creative writing facilitator Claire Hennessy is best known for her young adult fiction but has also built a strong reputation for her short stories and poetry. Her work has appeared in publications including The Moth, The Lonely Crow, ROPES, Crannóg, Southword and Necessary Fiction.

Her short fiction has earned international recognition, winning the Doolin Short Story Prize in 2015 and the Virginia Faulkner Award in 2022. She is the recipient of three Arts Council bursaries and holds M.Phil. degrees in Creative Writing and Popular Literature from Trinity College Dublin.

Paul Perry, an award-winning poet and novelist, read alongside Hennessy. He has co-authored four international bestsellers under the pen name Karen Perry and is the author of The Garden and Paradise House (Somerville Press, 2025), both critically acclaimed works.

A professor at University College Dublin, he directs the Mary Lavin Centre for Creative Writing. Perry has received the Hennessy Prize and the Listowel Poetry Prize and has published five poetry collections, the most recent of which was shortlisted for the Farmgate Prize. His forthcoming collection, Clockhammer, will be published by Doire Press in autumn 2025.

The evening drew a warm audience for readings from both authors’ latest works, interspersed with live music from Jimmy Tooher and Barry McNulty, creating a convivial start to the festival.

At the festival, Claire Hennessy read from her adult fiction debut, In the Movie of Her Life, a collection of edgy, voice-driven short stories that confront dark, often unsettling truths with rare honesty. Her characters wrestle with the gap between the lives they imagined and the lives they actually lead, grappling with deep longings and quiet devastation.

Paul Perry also read from his forthcoming collection, Clockhammer, a work deeply engaged with the nature of time. The poems explore not just its passage, but its pressures, distortions, absences, and residues. Time is treated as recursive, spectral, and spatial, as in The Topology of Time: ‘the garden of the clock grows wild.’

The collection presents chronology as an unreliable narrator, where memory and its ghosts appear not as testimony but as presence. In this way, Clockhammer serves as an elegy for multiple selves, each flickering in and out of being.

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