Dublin Ghost Story Festival

The literary ghost story in all its guises has deep roots in Ireland – from the domestic hauntings of Mrs. Riddell's Weird Stories to the spectral disturbances of J.S. Le Fanu's In a Glass Darkly; from Elizabeth Bowen's urbane “Demon Lover” to Bram Stoker's blood-drenched and monolithic contribution to literature: Dracula.

Join the Dublin Ghost Story Festival to raise a pint of the black stuff and celebrate literature of the supernatural — both past and present — in a city where some of the genre's most memorable nightmares were born. Slainte!

Guest of Honour – Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates’s career spans half a century and with nearly fifty novels to her name. She is the recipient of multiple awards including the National Book Award, the O. Henry Award, the National Humanities Medal, the PEN America Lifetime Achievement Award, as well as multiple nominations for the Pulitzer Prize. Oates’s interest in supernatural literature is well-known. She has edited a volume of Shirley Jackson’s work for the Library of America, a selection of American gothic tales for Penguin, and written extensively on H.P. Lovecraft. Oates has also penned multiple volumes of her own supernatural and macabre stories, including Night-Side (1977), Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque (1994), the Stoker Award-winning collection The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (2011), and The Doll-Master and Other Tales of Terror (2016).

The Lure of the Ghost Story – Reggie Oliver

In this two-part evening Reggie Oliver looks at the ghost story through history beginning from the earliest times up to present day, its function in culture, its changing face and its perennial fascination. As an example of the principles of the classic Anglo-Irish ghost story, he will perform his own tale “Quieta non Movere”, set in the 1870s in a cathedral town.