An evening with… Rupert Dastur and Elizabeth O’Connor

We can’t wait to welcome these two fabulous authors to the Book-ish Loft – Rupert Dastur and Elizabeth O’Connor, who will be in conversation about their debut novels. Rupert Dastur’s Cloudless will be hot-off the-press as a hardback and Elizabeth O’Connor’s Whale Fall which was hugely successful as a hardback last year will be released as paperback. Don’t miss out on what’s sure to be a brilliant evening – all tickets include a glass of wine or a soft drink and there will be the opportunity to get books signed too.

About Cloudless and Rupert Dastur
It is Autumn 2004 and in a farmhouse on the hills outside Llandudno, a family endures the agonising wait for their son to return from Iraq. His decision to join up has left them reeling, yet there are other pressing concerns to be met at home: the working of the farmland that has been theirs for generations, and what to do with their troubled younger son. John, the father, falls once more into his gambling habit, even as the farm sits on the brink of bankruptcy. And Catrin, the boys’ doting mother begins an affair with an old flame from the city, glimpsing a life entirely different from her own. As each member of the family grasps at their own tenuous lifeline, they drift further from each other – until one fateful knock at the door. Written in luminous, exquisitely calibrated prose and set against the majestic Welsh landscape, Cloudless is a masterful portrayal of the fragility and resilience of human connection. 

Rupert Dastur is a writer, editor and publisher. His writing has been shortlisted for the Bath Short Story Award and the Fish Short Story Prize, and he won the Federation of Scottish Writers Award in 2018. He is the founder of TSS Publishing and director of the Cambridge Prizes for short fiction, and runs writing workshops across the UK and abroad. He read English at Cambridge University and lives in London. Cloudless is his debut novel. The farmhouse in the novel is based on Rupert’s uncle and aunt’s farm in Wales where he spent a lot of his childhood.

About Whale Fall and Elizabeth O’Connor
It is 1938 and on an island off the coast of Wales, Manod is trying to imagine her future. Her choices are stark: she must either stay and look after her father’s house, in the wild landscape that drove her mother to madness, or marry and leave. And so, when two English anthropologists arrive on the island, Manod senses the possibility of a thrilling new life. But, as she becomes entangled in their work, and their strange relationship, the outside world she had yearned for appears a much darker place than she could ever have imagined. Elizabeth O’Connor’s beautiful, devastating debut Whale Fall tells a story of longing and betrayal set against the backdrop of a world on the edge of great tumult.

Elizabeth O’Connor lives in Birmingham. Her short stories have appeared in The White Review and Granta, and she was the 2020 winner of the White Review Short Story Prize. She holds a PhD in English Literature from the University of Birmingham, specialising in the modernist writer H.D. and her writing of coastal landscapes. Her debut novel, Whale Fall, was published in 2024 by Picador and was chosen as one of the Observer’s ten best debut novels of the year.