Telling Truths : Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing

Evelyn Conlon is one of Ireland’s most important writers. She has published four collections of short stories, My Head is Opening (1987), Taking Scarlet as a Real Colour (1993), Telling: New and Selected Short Stories (2000) and Moving about the Place (2021) and four novels, Stars in the Daytime (1989), A Glassful of Letters (1998) Skin of Dreams (2003) and Not the Same Sky (2013). She has also edited Later On: The Monaghan Bombing Memorial Anthology (2004).

Telling Truths: Evelyn Conlon and the Task of Writing is the first book to provide a critical assessment of her work. Drawing on a variety of perspectives such as feminism, ethics, famine studies, mobility studies, translation studies, short fiction, narratology and historiographic metafiction, the essays gathered in this volume reveal that Conlon’s writing, characterised by sharp observation, insistently questions the predetermined course of female existence, explores alternative forms of freedom and ultimately reflects her commitment to seek and tell truths. The intersectional approach of the book is part of a current endeavour in Irish Studies to keep interrogating well established topics, to examine the elusiveness of others and to explore new boundaries through renewed epistemological and ethical positions.

M. Teresa Caneda-Cabrera is Associate Professor of English at the University of Vigo (Galicia) in Spain. She is the author of La estética modernista como práctica de resistencia en A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (2000), the editor of Vigorous Joyce: Atlantic Readings of James Joyce (2010) and has been a member of the Editorial Board of European Joyce Studies since 2010. Her current research in the field of Irish Studies focuses on mobility, silence and vulnerability. She has coordinated the State- and ERDF- funded Research Project «INTRUTHS: Inconvenient Truths: Cultural Practices of Silence in Contemporary Irish Literature» FFI2017-84619-P AEI/FEDER, UE and is currently the Principal Investigator of «INTRUTHS 2: Articulations of Individual and Communal Vulnerabilities in Contemporary Irish Writing» PID2020-114776GB-I00 MCIN/AEI.