Please join the Keough-Naughton Institute for a public event with Belfast author Jan Carson. As part of the ACIS Midwest + South Regions Meetings 2026, Carson will provide the conference’s keynote address on Saturday, September 26th, 4:30 - 5:45 pm in 215-216 McKenna Hall. This specific ACIS event will be free and open to the public. For more information and to register for the full ACIS conference, please visit the conference website.
About Jan Carson
Jan Carson is the author of several short story collections and novels including her newest book Few and Far Between; Quickly, While They Still Have Horses; The Raptures; and The Fire Starters, winner of the EU Prize for Literature. She has won the Harper’s Bazaar short story competition and been shortlisted for many awards, including the BBC National Short Story Award, the Seán Ó Faoláin Short Story Prize, and the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year. Jan is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and her writing has been translated into over a dozen languages, appeared in numerous journals, and been frequently broadcast on BBC Radio. She lives in Belfast.
About Few And Far Between
In 1958, a Northern Irish politician proposed an unusual solution to the unemployment problem: draining Lough Neagh, the largest lake on the island of Ireland, to create a seventh county for the north. The ludicrous plan never came to fruition, but in Few And Far Between, Belfast-based writer Jan Carson reimagines an alternative history in which it did, revealing an archipelago of islands that became a fragile utopian refuge for those displaced by violence, prejudice, and political division during the height of the Troubles. The novel follows Marion and Robert-John Connolly, who arrived on “the Ark” as children in the 1970s, brought by their anthropologist father who had come to study the Ark’s unusual social experiment. Nearly fifty years later, they remain on the islands as its final caretakers, keeping watch over the Far Side islands, where ghostly figures linger and the past never stay fully buried. When a toxic algae bloom prompts the government to consider flooding the lough and erasing the Ark entirely, Marion and Robert-John are forced to confront the possibility of losing the only home they have ever known. Yet decades of isolation, secrets, shame, and resentment have created a distance between them that they struggle to overcome. When a young anthropologist arrives to conduct field research on the Ark, the siblings begin to hope the scholar might help preserve their home before the flood.
Blending alternate history, climate fiction, and moments of magical realism, Carson’s novel explores the long shadow of the Troubles through humor, empathy, and a distinctly Northern Irish voice. Told through multiple perspectives, including excerpts from the visiting scholar’s manuscript-in-progress, Few And Far Between examines generational trauma, rigid gender roles, family secrets, and the uneasy question of what becomes of places that were built as refuge once the world that created them has changed.