Join us at Braemar Literary Festival this September for a rich and transporting conversation exploring love, identity and belonging in all its myriad forms with two exciting debut authors – Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin and Lorna Elcock – in discussion with chair and award-winning author Kiran Millwood Hargrave. Together these three novelists will discuss love and the search for belonging through rugged landscapes, chance encounters, and the grief of returning home criss-crossing 1970s Paris, rural Ireland and the Scottish Highlands.

Niamh Ní Mhaoileoin’s Ordinary Saints, shortlisted for the 2022 Women’s Prize Discoveries programme, follows Jay, a young queer woman raised in a devout Irish Catholic household who is summoned home after the sudden death of her brother. Lorna Elcock’s The Windhover, shortlisted for the 2021 Discoveries programme, is an immersive story of rural uprooting and devastating family secrets. Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s Almost Life centres on a decades-long entanglement of two women in 1970s Paris. She is also the author of the Sunday Times bestseller The Mercies and a former judge for the Discoveries programme.

10 – 11am | 27 September 2026 | Braemar Village Hall