Mark O’Connell, the Writer versus the Murderer

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On the occasion of the Setmana del Llibre en Català, the award-winning writer Mark O'Connell will talk to journalist Anna Guitart following the publication of A Thread of Violence, the first book to get one of the most notorious murderers in Irish history to talk.

In A Thread of Violence (published in Catalan by Comanegra, 2024), awarded at the Irish Book Awards as best non-fiction work of 2023, the writer Mark O'Connell gives voice for the first time to the murderer Malcolm Macarthur, an Irish aristocrat with financial problems who, in 1982, decides to rob a bank and, in the attempt to get a car and a gun, ends up killing two young twenty-seven-year-olds. He took refuge in the house of the State Attorney General, and the case became one of the most important political scandals of the time. Macarthur was imprisoned and became a celebrity, and forty years after these events, the wild intellectual myth surrounding the murderer, 10 years after his release from prison, has not ceased to grow.

In this conversation, Mark O'Connell and Anna Guitart will discuss how an ethical reflection on the relationship between truth and fiction is constructed from this story, and the necessity and dangers of exploring the darker side of the human mind.

This event will be in Catalan and English.

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