Venue: Passa Porta Bookshop, Brussels
Tickets: Pre-sale €11/8 On the door €13/10 pre-book HERE
Kaleidoscope is a project by EFACIS, supported by KU Leuven and the Irish College. In each of its instalments Irish and Northern Irish authors explore a different theme. For the third edition, the theme was ‘Faith, Spirituality and Art’. We have invited four of these writers, including our writer in residence Jan Carson, to take part in a panel discussion chaired by Hedwig Schwall on this inexhaustible theme.
kaleidoscope
Each year, the Kaleidoscope series of EFACIS (European Federation of Centres and Associations of Irish Studies) brings together writers and artists from the island of Ireland to explore a topical theme. Kaleidoscope 1 gathered 50 reflections on the practice of writing fiction, while Kaleidoscope 2 asked authors about the significance of Europe to them. Kaleidoscope 3 explores insights into ‘Faith, Spirituality and Art’.
new perspectives on religion
With a quarter of the twenty-first century behind us, we look back on the very diverse ways in which religion has shaped the emotions and ideas of the Irish and Northern Irish. Now that many religious institutions on the Emerald Isle and elsewhere have lost credibility, writers are exploring new perspectives on faith and spirituality. They choose for themselves how to do so: through an essay, a poem or a short story. Thirty contributions are already available to read on the Kaleidoscope 3 website.
a diverse quartet
Hedwig Schwall, editor of the Kaleidoscope project, will lead a discussion on these themes with four different representatives from the island of Ireland. Jan Carson from Northern Ireland, who will be writer-in-residence at Passa Porta this October, published her new novel, Few and Far Between, earlier this year. Kala is Colin Walsh’s highly acclaimed and award-winning debut. Louise Nealon’s second novel, Everything That Is Beautiful, published in 2026, is set in the Irish countryside and tells the story of three women. Martin Doyle is a literary journalist at The Irish Times and the author and editor of several non-fiction books on Ireland.
about the authors
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Jan Carson has published novels, short story collections, plays and microfiction. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature in 2019. Her second novel, The Raptures, was released in early 2022, followed two years later by the short story collection Quickly, While They Still Have Horses. In 2025 she was a guest at the Passa Porta Festival. Her latest novel, Few and Far Between, came out in April 2026. She lives in Belfast.
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Martin Doyle is a literary journalist at The Irish Times and former editor-in-chief of The Irish Post. He is the author of Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place, a literary memoir about the conflict in Northern Ireland, which was shortlisted for Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. He is also the author of A Hosting: Interviews with Irish Writers 1991–2026, a retrospective on his career featuring 60 in-depth conversations with leading writers, from John Banville to Sally Rooney.
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Louise Nealon is from County Kildare. In 2017 she received the Francis Ledwidge Creative Writing Award and won the Seán Ó Faoláin International Short Story Competition with her first published short story, ‘What Feminism Is’. Her debut novel, Snowflake, became a bestseller and earned her the Newcomer of the Year award at the Irish Book Awards. Snowflake has been translated into more than a dozen languages. Her second novel, Everything That Is Beautiful, came out in April 2026. She currently lives in Belfast, where she is working on her third novel.
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Colin Walsh (b. 1986, Galway) made his breakthrough in 2017 with a series of short stories that earned him the Francis MacManus Short Story Prize and Hennessy Literary Award. After travelling the world, Walsh landed in Belgium in 2013 to study philosophy at KU Leuven and to work quietly on his debut novel. The result was Kala, published in 2023. In this novel, three men are reunited after many years around the lifeless body of a mutual childhood friend. The Guardian and Goodreads were full of praise for the narrative tension and characterization in this acclaimed debut novel.
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about the moderator
Hedwig Schwall is professor emerita at KU Leuven. Her focus is on interdisciplinary research into contemporary Irish literature and European art. She has edited numerous books and sits on the editorial boards of six journals on Irish Studies. As project director of the European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies (EFACIS), she publishes the Kaleidoscope series, which is available online.