A public interview with US author Michael Connelly by Irish crime fiction author John Connolly will be the highlight of the Irish Crime Fiction Festival organized by Trinity College Dublin’s School of English in conjunction with New York University’s Glucksman Ireland House on November 22 and 23.

The largest such festival to date, it will see 18 of the most exciting Irish and Irish-American crime novelists explore the recent flourishing of crime fiction in Ireland. Irish crime fiction writers have been receiving wide international critical acclaim of late.

Six of the 18 crime fiction authors participating in the festival are graduates of Trinity, where the School of English was the first in Ireland to offer students the chance to study crime-writing as part of their undergraduate work in its seminal course on detective fiction.

The two-day Dublin event will incorporate a series of panel discussions featuring leading crime fiction authors including: Declan Burke, John Connolly, Alan Glynn, Declan Hughes, Arlene Hunt, Gene Kerrigan, Stuart Neville, Niamh O’Connor and Louise Phillips. They will explore the long and complex history of relations between Ireland and America which is finding new forms of expression in crime writing. Other topics to be investigated will be historical crime fiction, Irish crime fiction abroad, and crime fiction in contemporary Ireland.

The highlight of the festival will be a public interview with US crime author Michael Connelly by Irish crime author and Trinity School of English graduate John Connolly in the atmospheric setting of Trinity’s Public Theatre. Michael Connelly will be launching his new novel "The Gods of Guilt" at this event.

A full programme of the festival, author biographies and ticket information are available here www.tcd.ie/English/irishcrimefiction.