Join us for an in conversation event with William Keohane and Amy Key to celebrate the publication of William's stunning memoir, Out There.
About the book:
How do you make a life in an unliveable present, when the path to change is impossibly slow?
Gender transition doesn’t happen in a clinic, nor does it unfold in a straight line. For William Keohane, it is a journey mapped across words, names, and the Irish landscape. As Will navigates the endless waiting for referrals, appointments, hormones, and surgery, he compassionately charts the many people and places that have shaped his life—both with their love and their willingness to change alongside him. At once sparkling and meditative, with prose of undeniable eddying force, Out There is a universal reflection on transformation and becoming, which asks just how much has to change before we’re seen as who we are.
‘Emotionally brutal and lyrically masterful. I wanted to stay on the train in Keohane's voice forever.’ – Chloe Caldwell
‘A spacious story, in many senses of the term, both expansive and intimate and with so much space in-between the two that lets the air in. And out. Breathe deep. It’s a trip.’ – Diarmuid Hester
‘Out There is a gift to a reader — a work of incredible beauty and generosity. Every moment and feeling rendered so vividly and truly that you feel you are there, the most privileged witness.’ – Rebecca Perry
‘A refreshing, beautiful, and quietly original work, which resists easy affirmatory narratives in favour of something truer, subtler, and more evanescent.’
– Tim MacGabhann
‘Both beautiful and exhilarating. William Keohane is a writer of such honest feeling, such hope and warmth and kindness, that his work feels properly radical.’
– Lisa McInerney
About the authors:
William Keohane
William Keohane is a writer from Limerick. His essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, The Dublin Review, and GQ Magazine, among others. Boxing Day, a poetry performance, toured internationally and was nominated for an award at the Dublin Fringe Festival. In 2021, he was longlisted for Canongate’s Nan Shepherd Prize for Nature Writing, received a Literature Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and was one of ten poets selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions series. William holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Limerick, and is currently completing a PhD in poetry at the Seamus Heaney Centre in Queen's University Belfast.
Amy Key
William will be joined for this event by Amy Key. Amy is a writer based in London. She is the author of Arrangements in Blue (Jonathan Cape, 2023), chosen as a Book of the Year by The Sunday Times, Independent, Irish Times and Granta and shortlisted by Foyles for their Non Fiction Book of the Year 2023. She is also the author of two collections of poetry, Luxe (Salt, 2013) and Isn’t Forever (Bloodaxe, 2018), which was a Poetry Book Society Wild Card Choice and a book of the year in the Guardian, New Statesman, Times and Irish Times. Her poems have been widely published and anthologised, and her essays have appeared in the collections At The Pond (2019) and By the River (2024) published by Daunt, as well as Granta, Vogue, The Poetry Review and elsewhere.