SCRIBES at the Rock is always one of the most popular literary events at Féile and Phobail every year – and this year it will be no exception, with one of the guest authors just having his new novel announced on the long list for this year's Booker Prize.

Paul Murray will be at the Rock Bar to read extracts from his new novel The Bee Sting, about the fate and the unravelling of the well-to-do Barnes’ family in an unnamed Irish midlands’ town after the 2008 economic crash. It is dark and hilarious and holds you in its substantial grip from page one. 

Paul’s blackly comic, Skippy Dies, was also long-listed for the Booker Prize in 2010. The Mark and The Void was joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize; and An Evening of Goodbyes was shortlisted for the Whitbread First Novel Award.

Also reading from his highly acclaimed debut novel on August 10 will be  Michael Magee from Poleglass. His debut novel, Close to Home, has received widespread acclaim, and is the story of Sean, a graduate, involved in a drunken assault on a night out, and follows his reflections – the struggles of his working-class upbringing and the lingering shadows that the Troubles have cast on the ‘ceasefire generation’.

Factory Girls is Michelle Gallen’s darkly comic follow-up to Big Girl, Small Town (currently being adapted for TV). The main character is smart-mouthed and filthy-minded Maeve Murray who is in a summer job, ironing 800 shirts a day, hoping that her A-Level results will be her ticket out of the North. It is 1994, pre-ceasefire, and there is the divisive marching season to contend with… and the paws of her English boss, Handy Andy Strawbridge, to dodge.

Michelle will also be at Scribes on August 10.

Doors open at 3.30pm. Admission £6.