Win a golden ticket to the Abbey Theatre, the National Theatre of Ireland.

The National Theatre of Stories
- a celebration of epic Irish storytelling is at the heart of the Abbey Theatre's artistic programme for 2025.
The National Theatre of Ireland will feature the best of new Irish playwriting, with six world premieres from playwrights Kevin Barry, Barbara Bergin, Marina Carr, Carys D. Coburn, Caitríona Daly and Jimmy McAleavey set for the Abbey and Peacock Stages. The six playwrights represent an assortment of the most thrilling voices in Irish playwriting today. The six plays are:
The Cave
, written by Kevin Barry and directed by Caitríona McLaughlin: June 6th to July 18th on the Abbey Stage.
Static
, written by Jimmy McAleavey and directed by John King: June 20th to July 18th on the Peacock Stage.
The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4
, written by Caitríona Daly and directed by Raymond Keane: July 31st to September 6th on the Peacock Stage.
The Boy
, written by Marina Carr and directed by Caitríona McLaughlin: September 15th to November 1st on the Abbey Stage.
BÁN
, written by Carys D. Coburn and directed by Claire O'Reilly: September 30th to November 8th on the Peacock Stage.
Dublin Gothic
, written by Barbara Bergin and directed by Caroline Byrne: November 21st to January 31st, 2025 on the Abbey Stage.
Learn more about these six plays and see what else is on at your national theatre
here
.
For your chance to win, simply fill in the form below. Good luck!
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The prize is two tickets to each Abbey Theatre world premiere production scheduled for 2025 including: The Cave by Kevin Barry, Static by Jimmy McAleavey, The Lunch Punch Power Hour in Conference Room 4 by Caitríona Daly, The Boy by Marina Carr, Bán by Carys D. Coburn and Dublin Gothic by Barbara Bergin. There will be one winner.
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Irish Times

38 minutes ago

• Irish Times

Lorde on weight loss and body image: ‘It's this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women'

There is a note of sadness in Lorde 's voice as she thinks back to her last visit to Ireland . 'I was deep in the weeds,' she says. 'I was about a week post break-up of my long-term relationship and I was really stuck. I had sort of just come off my birth control. I was having this crazy kind of hormonal swing.' This was August 2023, and Lorde – aka the songwriter and pop star Ella Yelich-O'Connor – was headlining the All Together Now festival in Waterford. On a gorgeous blue-skied evening, her performance was typically confident and cathartic, as she moved, quicksilver-fast, between hits such as Team and Green Light, the effervescent 2017 banger that she wrote with Taylor Swift's producer Jack Antonoff . [ Lorde at All Together Now: Knockout performance underscores singer's star power Opens in new window ] Behind the scenes, though, she was reeling. She had split from her partner of nearly a decade, the Australian record executive Justin Warren, and was also working through the emotional aftershock of a brief eating disorder – subjects that she addresses frankly and viscerally on her brilliantly propulsive new album, Virgin. 'This record is a byproduct of an insane personal quest of the last couple of years,' she says. Lorde has never held back as a songwriter: her debut single, Royals, for example, from 2013, took aim at the music industry's history of prioritising commerce over art. Still, even by her own highly confessional standards, the honesty with which she talks about body image on Virgin is striking. 'I cover up all the mirrors … make a meal I won't eat,' she sings on the single What Was That, a bittersweet disco onslaught that blends euphoria and emotional torment. READ MORE Smiling softly, she explains that working on the album was part of the process of making herself whole again – and of reflecting on her issues around her weight. 'It was actually really hard for me to accept. I almost still can't accept it. I'm lucky in that it wasn't very long,' she says. 'It could definitely have been a lot worse. For me, any kind of restriction of who I am supposed to be just does not work. It completely blocked my creativity and cut me off from a life force. 'It took me quite a long time to realise that was happening. It's also like this evil little rite of passage for a lot of women. I don't think it's a unique experience I had. It felt algorithmically predestined or something.' Yelich-O'Connor was a 16-year-old kid from the Auckland suburbs when Royals became a global number one; the follow-up album, Pure Heroine, went on to sell more than five million copies. Her megastardom endures: tickets for her first stand-alone Dublin show, at the RDS this November, sold out in a heartbeat. That journey – a rollercoaster with no emergency brake – has left scars. Virgin is, in part, a reckoning with that painful transformation from everyday teenager to international chart-topper. 'You form totally differently when people are looking at you from a young age,' she says. 'I still dream probably once a month that a man is taking a photo of me with a long-lens camera. It's deep in my subconscious that someone might be looking at me and capturing something that I'm [not ready] for them to see.' But she was ready to show a vulnerable side last year when she and Charli XCX , her friend and fellow star, collaborated on a remix of Charli's song Girl, So Confusing. The crowning moment in Charli's 'Brat summer', the track was also a red-letter moment for Lorde, in that it flung the veil off a period of immense turmoil. Girl, So Confusing, which thrillingly combines Charli's Day-Glo mosh-pit energy with Lorde's elevated goth vibes, had its origins in a low-key rift between these close acquaintances. Lorde was going through her issues, and Charli was aware of a growing distance between the two. She wondered if she had said or done something. It was, as Charli sang, 'so confusing'. On the remix, which confirmed internet speculation about the identity of the 'girl' in the lyrics, Lorde sets her straight, singing, 'for the last couple years I've been at war in my body. I tried to starve myself thinner, and then I gained all the weight back. I was trapped in the hatred.' 'It felt super scary and vulnerable for me to be expressing on that level,' Lorde says about the song, which she joined Charli XCX on stage to sing at Coachella earlier this year. 'But I had been working on Virgin for a good while at that point and was trying to make this statement about femininity that was uncompromising and very truthful.' [ Charli XCX at Malahide Castle review: High flying pop star brings Brat to Dublin but never quite achieves lift-off Opens in new window ] Lorde talks about embracing 'discomfort' as a tool for personal growth. That was point of Girl, So Confusing and the two singles she has released from Virgin, What Was That and Man of the Year, the latter a stark unpacking of her 2023 break-up. 'I'd come to this realisation as an artist that my personal discomfort is … I'm not going to let my fear stand in the way of making an expression of truth that feels really important to make,' she says. 'It might, I don't know, be helpful for other people to hear. Just doing the scary thing – I was, like, just see what happens if you do it. And [it was] so cool that I had been working on this album and then, kind of unbeknownst to me, Charli had been processing her own uncompromising womanhood, trying to become that sort of woman also. 'It felt like the right moment to test the waters of the direction of some of the subject matter I'd been writing for my own record and [meet] her vulnerability with my own vulnerability. There had to be something on the line for it to really land. It was freaky – but beautiful too. I felt something release in me when the song released.' Testing the waters included talking about her feelings about gender. She told Rolling Stone recently that she is 'in the middle gender-wise' – a point she reiterates in Hammer, her new album's opening track, singing, 'some days I'm a woman/ some days I'm a man'. (In recent public appearances she had been dressing in androgynous grey slacks and tees.) Lorde clarifies that she still identifies as a woman but has always felt a masculine energy within her, something she has historically pushed down, feeling that society would judge her. On Virgin she is learning to embrace it. If men are allowed get in touch with their feminine side, why can't women celebrate their inner masculinity? 'We have these containers, some of which are really helpful and work really well for us, and some of which just don't do the job. And for me, understanding that I am a woman, that's how I identify … I don't see that changing,' she says. 'But there's also something in me that is masculine, and I've always been that way since I was a child. There was a 'bothness' to me. And being okay with that, not being easy to be boxed up, you … It can be a bit uncomfortable to not have the tidiness. But I think that it's worth it for me to be true to myself and see what comes as a result.' Born in 1996, Lorde grew up on Auckland's North Shore, the daughter of a poet mother of Croatian heritage and a civil-engineer father of Irish extraction. When she was six she was identified as a 'gifted child', though her mother vetoed her attending a school for children of exceptional intelligence, fearing it might impact her social development. She was undoubtedly precocious: she was a keen poetry reader before her 10th birthday; at 14 she was editing her mother's master's thesis. Her musical breakthrough was the result of talent, luck and perseverance. A friend of her father's saw her perform at a school talent contest, in which she sang songs by Pixie Lott and Duffy. Impressed by her haunting voice and natural stage presence, he tipped off Universal Records, which paired her with the veteran indie musician Joel Little. Hitting it off immediately, they would work together during weekends or when O'Connor was on school holidays, capturing in music the experiences of being a teenager: the intensity of adolescent friendship, the big dreams, the anxiety about the future. All of those were poured into Royals, an overnight hit that knocked Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball off the top of the US charts and made Lorde, at 16, the youngest woman to have a US number one since Tiffany, with I Think We're Alone Now, in 1987. Virgin is in many ways a continuation of Royals and Pure Heroine, in that it is immediately catchy yet has an aura of mystery. What's new is what Lorde identifies as the record's 'visceral' quality: it feels like a body-horror movie in reverse. The cover image is a blue-tinted X-ray of a pelvis that shows a belt buckle, a trouser zip and, referencing her decision to come off birth control, a contraceptive coil. Her lyrics talk unflinchingly about women's bodies: ovulation, piercings and the cutting of the umbilical cord. It oozes emotional gore, but in a way intended to celebrate rather than shame or stigmatise. 'I felt I didn't have a document, or a piece of art, that expressed to me the visceral, intense, gross ... but also beautiful ... glory … all these elements to being in a female body. I need them all to be present. 'There's something pretty unsparing about how I do it. I believe that is a statement of value. When I was making the album I was, like, 'I don't see women's bodies, I don't see the fullness of a woman's body online…' It feels important to me to show this.' Virgin arrives four years after Lorde's previous LP, Solar Power . A departure from her more zestful pop, the album had a languid, lulling quality that threw much of her audience. It was mesmerising, but there were no bangers. Some fans are still conflicted about it. Lorde adores the record – and believes she is a stronger artist for putting out a project perceived as not having done as well as its predecessors. 'I love that album. I'm so grateful for it. I'm so proud of myself, actually, for making it, because it required a big step off the path or on to another path, maybe,' she says. 'It changed me as an artist. I'd been sort of this like golden child, and I had had this experience of having the first things that I put out being met with such a glowing response in a lot of ways. 'Having a response that was different to that was super, like, informative. It made me realise that you have got to be making work that, no matter what the response is, you just love … 100 per cent, because that response' – public adulation – 'isn't guaranteed, and it can't be what's going to fill you up.' Lorde would like to think that Virgin will be received differently – but she won't be devastated if that's not the case. 'I really remember saying that I wanted ... to feel, no matter what happens tomorrow, this is everything I want. I'm so proud of this. There's nothing I would do differently. I remember saying that to myself and totally feel like that … This could get panned, God forbid, but it could – and I would [still] love it so much.' Solar Power 'taught me a lot. I do love that album. It's beautiful and sweet.' Famous her entire adult existence, Lorde has experienced both the highs and the lows of life in the spotlight. Does she ever feel in competition with other women artists? That's how the industry often works, after all, setting women musicians against each other, making them feel that, for them to thrive, others must fail. 'I was talking to Charli about this, actually. She said, 'Yeah, we all have our fragile eras.' Sometimes you're just in your fragile era, and I think particularly when you're forming a statement, like when I'm making an album but it's early days, and I don't really have any architecture that I'm living underneath, that can absolutely be the moment where the kind of competition – or, sorry, the comparison – can creep up.' Her way of working through those doubts has been to acknowledge that there's a certain sound only she can make: to embrace the pure, heroic Lordeness of who she is and what she does. 'Honestly, the last couple years I've just been on such a mission of trying to really understand what it is that only I can do, because there's just so much value in that, and that really has shifted my mindset away from, like, 'Oh, but I can't do this as well as she can do this.' I'm, like, 'No … you're one of one. You're the number-one expert in the world at doing your thing.' She pauses and smiles again. 'It's helpful.' Virgin is released on Friday, June 27th. Lorde plays the RDS, in Dublin, on Saturday, November 22nd

Irish Times

an hour ago

• Irish Times

Event guide: Olivia Rodrigo, Van Morrison, and the other best things to do in Ireland this week

Event of the week Olivia Rodrigo Tuesday, June 24th, Marlay Park, Dublin, 4pm, €119/€89.90 (sold out), Olivia Rodrigo 's debut single, Drivers License, shattered one streaming record after another when it was released in 2021. Her life, she said at the time, 'shifted in an instant'. Rodrigo's combination of lyrically insightful piano ballads and streamlined pop-punk has helped to make her one of today's biggest stars. This open-air Dublin gig is the singer's second stop in the city on her Guts world tour, which is about to segue into a summer of outdoor dates that include Hyde Park in London and the pyramid-stage headline slot on the final day of this year's Glastonbury Festival, on Sunday, June 29th. Fans can expect a 20-song set featuring hits such as Good 4 U, Traitor, Bad Idea Right?, Happier, Enough for You, Drivers License and Brutal. Support comes from the excellent English singer-songwriter Beabadoobee and the rising Irish band Florence Road. Gigs Ani DiFranco Sunday, June 22nd, NCH, Dublin, 8pm, €55/€45, Ani DiFranco By the age of nine Ani DiFranco was busking and playing cover versions of Beatles songs at bars and cafes in Buffalo, New York. Within a few years she was writing songs – and by the age of 15, when her mother moved to rural Connecticut, she was legally living as an emancipated minor. Since then DiFranco has lived by her own rules. In 1989 she founded the independent label Righteous Babe Records and developed a singular creative output that blends opinion, discourse, and manifesto. In other words? Pay attention. Van Morrison Monday, June 23rd, and Tuesday, June 24th, Europa Hotel, Belfast, 6pm, £331 (sold out) Rumour on Cypress Avenue has it that Van Morrison is back in the game. With his recent album Remembering Now – his 47th studio work – gathering plaudits, and his 80th birthday on the horizon – it's on August 31st – there is an expectation that the prolific songwriter and performer will revisit his classic-era recordings for these two homecoming shows. The atmosphere is more that of a softly lit nightclub than of a sweaty venue, however: the ticket price includes a three-course gala dinner, plus birthday cake. With new music that references the romantic lyricism of his 1989 album, Avalon Sunset, Morrison appears to have emerged from a post-Covid fugue into, if not the mystic, then a latter-day phase of serenity. Gang of Four Thursday, June 26th, and Friday, June 27th, Button Factory, Dublin, 8pm, €40, After the deaths of their bandmates Andy Gill, in 2020, and Dave Allen, this year, Gang of Four's two remaining original members, Jon King and Hugo Burnham, soldier on. The band – augmented by the American musicians Gail Greenwood and Ted Leo – originally formed in Leeds in 1976, and they visit Dublin as part of their Long Goodbye tour. The shows will feature two sets: a track-by-track rundown of the band's punk/avant-garde 1979 debut album, Entertainment!, and a best-of selection of fan favourites. READ MORE Stage Wreckquiem From Thursday, June 26th, until Saturday, July 5th, Lime Tree, Limerick, 8pm, €28/€25, Pat Shortt Is it really a problem if you own eight copies of Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band? Not if you're the owner of Dessie's Discs, a beloved if somewhat ramshackle second-hand-record shop that comes under threat of closure when redevelopment plans circle around it. At the heart of this new play by the award-winning playwright Mike Finn is the worth of community spirit, underdog tenacity and the obsessive nature of committed music fans. Pat Shortt, Patrick Ryan, Sade Malone and Joan Sheehy star. Andrew Flynn directs. In conversation Frank Skinner Friday, June 27th, Seamus Heaney HomePlace, Bellaghy, Co Derry, 7.30pm, £22.50 (sold out), You might not have associated one of Britain's best-known comedians with literature, but for the past five years Frank Skinner's acclaimed Poetry Podcast (now in its 10th series) has featured discussions on and explorations of a wide variety of his favourite poems and poets (including Personal Helicon by Seamus Heaney). Skinner is in conversation with the poet and critic Scott McKendry. Classical West Cork Chamber Music Festival From Friday, June 27th, until Sunday, July 6th, Bantry, Co Cork, various venues, times and prices, Rachel Podger With more classical performances than you can shake a violin bow at, this year's West Cork Chamber Music Festival once again presents a blend of prestige concerts, emerging musicians, sidebar events and interesting fringe shows. Highlights include Barry Douglas playing Schubert's Piano Sonata in A Minor (Saturday, June 28th, Bantry House, 7.30pm, €50/€40/€30), Meliora Quartet (Monday, June 30th, Amar's Cafe, Schull, 2.30pm, free) and the violinist Rachel Podger (Sunday, July 6th, St Brendan's Church, Bantry, 11am, €22/€16). Literature/arts Hinterland Festival From Thursday, June 26th, until Sunday, June 29th, Kells, Co Meath, various venues, times and prices, Heritage-town festivals don't come any sharper than Hinterland, which since 2013 has been bringing multidisciplinary artists and creatives to its base in Kells, Co Meath, for a four-day event that features history, literature, television, religion, memoir, music, futurism and current affairs. Must-see events include Lara Marlowe talking about How Good It Is I Have No Fear of Dying, her book with Lieut Yulia Mykytenko , the young commander of a Ukrainian drone unit; John Creedon on his acclaimed memoir, This Boy's Heart; John Banville discussing his latest crime novel, The Drowning; and the music journalist Simon Price talking about his love of The Cure. Still running Liam Gillick Until Saturday, June 28th, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, free, Mean Time Production Cycle, 2025 The latest exhibition by the British artist Liam Gillick, a 2002 Turner Prize nominee (and, with Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, one of the Young British Artists movement), features colourfully vivid work exploring forms of production in a postindustrial landscape. Book it this week Monty Franklin, Sugar Club, Dublin, September 17th, Clonakilty International Guitar Festival, Clonakilty, Co Cork, September 17th-21st, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Vicar Street, Dublin, October 7th, Caribou, Vicar Street, Dublin, December 10th,

Irish Times

an hour ago

• Irish Times

Timothy O'Grady: ‘You feel miserable most of the time when you're writing'

'I don't feel I have a capacity to make up a novel,' the writer Timothy O'Grady tells me. We're talking via Zoom from his home in Poland ('50 minutes away from Toruń, where Copernicus was born'), where O'Grady, 74, has lived since 2007. This might be a surprising statement, as we're here today to talk about O'Grady's new novel, Monaghan – his fourth. What he means is that he doesn't see his strength as 'mak[ing] up a character [or] situation'. Instead 'they come kind of surreptitiously' and sometimes from real events and people. That is certainly the case with Monaghan, which as the title suggests ('It's just such a beautiful word'), is a book about and around Ireland, set in Belfast , Monaghan and south Armagh , as well as in San Francisco. It centres around a number of men, all conflicted by their acts and history. First is Generous McCabe, a man known 'for his wildness and wealth' who was 'as old as the century himself' – and a republican, a gun runner for the IRA . He is based on Martin Walton, O'Grady says Walton had been 'out in the [1916] Rising and in the IRA. He'd been interned in Ballykinler, and he gave violin lessons in the internment camp to his fellow prisoners. When he came out, he had all these violins to sell because the truce had interrupted his lessons. He sold them quickly through a newspaper advertisement, and out of that became the largest retail musical instrument dealer in Europe' (Walton's Musical Instrument Galleries). READ MORE More central still to Monaghan's story is the character known as Ryan, an artist in San Francisco who, in a previous life, had been an IRA man responsible for brutal killings. He too is based on a real person. 'I can say his name now. It's Frank Quigley.' (Quigley died in 2022, and O'Grady wrote a tribute to him .) Quigley had 'stepped into this world of extreme violence', says O'Grady. 'They thought they were going to solve this 900-year-old dilemma with great enthusiasm.' But Quigley 'had always wanted to be an artist in his youth. He was imprisoned in Portlaoise and he asked the prison governor if they had art classes. And they didn't, but they did have embroidery classes. So he took the embroidery classes in Portlaoise. And eventually when he came out he did a degree in an art college in Belfast.' That friction between creation and destruction – between art and violence – is at the heart of the novel. How does involvement in acts of terrible violence ('the peelers took him away in a bag' is the outcome for one victim) square with the creative impulse? 'I was just wondering how you would get the self-belief to make art,' says O'Grady. As part of the preparation for Monaghan, he 'asked these different people what it's like to kill someone, and each of them said: you can't go back to who you were'. Of course, the people they killed also can't go back to who they were. 'The story could look like I'm gullibly romantic,' admits O'Grady. 'The Irish-American kind of coming home with sentimental ideas about it. And people could say that's fair enough.' But O'Grady has family experience in this area too. 'My cousin was in the Vietnam War. He was this very glamorous, witty, charismatic character, and he went to Vietnam and came back and more or less retreated into this husk, and drank himself to death for 40 years.' (This pain finds an echo in the novel, where a character 'blew out his brains' 20 years after returning from Vietnam.) I was straining for some kind of comedy. And it wasn't at all funny The story of Monaghan, then, is invented but inspired by reality. Finishing a painting is 'an anticlimax,' according to Ryan in the book, but from O'Grady's account of the gruelling gestation of the book, for him it may have been more a relief. 'I thought this book was finished in 2018,' O'Grady says. 'Then I sent it to a friend whose opinion I respect and he said, 'I can't relate to this guy'. [The artist-terrorist character of Ryan.] 'And I couldn't get this out of my head, you know? So I rewrote it, to win his approval, if not to please him. And I sent it again in 2020, and he declared himself satisfied!' But that was just the beginning: the book is published by Unbound, and went through a long crowdfunding process. 'And they finally committed to the book, and I reread it last year – and I was horrified by it. The characters were just too cartoonish. I was straining for some kind of comedy. And it wasn't at all funny. So I rewrote it in three months.' Even when a story comes to O'Grady from other sources, the challenge is that 'I have to make it live' . 'It's a very different experience,' he says. 'You feel miserable most of the time when you're writing. At least that's how I find it. You're just throwing yourself at it and failing, most of the time.' There's another aspect to Monaghan that we haven't mentioned yet – many of Ryan's paintings are represented in the text, illustrated by the artist Anthony Lott. (They're reproduced in black and white in the book, and there's a QR code to view them in full colour on Lott's website.) O'Grady was inspired to do this by reading John Berger's novel A Painter of Our Time, and wanting to see the paintings described in it. This is something that O'Grady has done before. Many readers will have come to him through his 1997 novel I Could Read the Sky , which included – was built around – photographs by Steve Pyke. What's the appeal of this approach? Musicians in I Could Read the Sky. Photograph: Steve Pyke 'It relieves you of the text,' he says. 'It works in a different part of the consciousness. It's more subliminal somehow.' With I Could Read the Sky, he adds: 'It relieved you of all that stuff you normally have to do with a novel, setting up all this stuff, describing everything and interconnecting everyone. I could go straight in.' 'With [Monaghan], I just thought you should see them [the paintings]. I liked the humour and the imagination in them. I mean, some people don't think they belong. There's no place for this stuff.' But O'Grady came of age as a reader in the 1970s, when writers like Gabriel García Márquez were gaining popularity in the West. 'And it's just so full of life, and not worried about what is or isn't permitted in the novel. He didn't care, he just wrote it.' Now that the long process of writing Monaghan is over, O'Grady says he's working on 'helping Stephen Rea write his memoir'. Is it difficult to write in another person's voice? 'In a way,' says O'Grady, but 'I've known him for a very, very long time. I met him in the 1970s when he was doing Playboy [of the Western World] and Endgame and all that stuff. And he's my daughter's godfather. [So] I'm very familiar with his life and his voice and his opinions.' 'But if I was asking him questions … ' O'Grady adds. 'If he's asked a question, it's like you've thrown a bucket of cockroaches on him. He just can't stand it. So we're co-authors, and I have some licence.' O'Grady was born in Chicago in 1951 and moved to Donegal at the age of 22, and lived in Ireland, England and Spain before settling in Poland . His father's parents were from Kerry , and on his mother's side, 'further back, there was somebody named Daniel O'Connell, who apparently had children all over the place'. But 'I didn't grow up in a very Irish-American world', he says. Although O'Grady still visits the US and says he loves being there, he doesn't expect to move back permanently. Largely this is because 'I like very much where I am now'. But he is, unsurprisingly, not enamoured of the current political climate there. 'Well, it isn't as if there was a democracy there particularly over the last 30 years,' he says. 'I just thought this morning, the [multi-billionaire conservative political donors] Koch brothers are running the world. Whatever they decide seems to be happening.' 'But now , this is…' O'Grady is almost lost for words. 'You know, people in black balaclavas [ICE agents], picking people up off the street and throwing them into vans. The blizzard of unconstitutional activity. They have no regard for the courts, they have no regard for the Constitution. It does seem fascist. 'You know, I saw [Bill] Clinton talking in Berlin,' O'Grady says, 'about a doctor who had got up before him, talking about extending life. And he said, 'I hope they hurry up, because I don't have that much time left.' And then I thought, will Trump be wearing laurel wreaths and a toga in the year 2187? Is this what's going to happen?' He laughs – because what other option is there? Monaghan is published by Unbound. Timothy O'Grady will be speaking at the Hinterland Festival on June 29th at noon.