Kirk Walsh is a novelist, an editor and a teacher based in Austin, Texas. Her debut novel, “The Elephant of Belfast,” inspired by true events that took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, during World War II, was published by Counterpoint Press in April. Now in its fourth printing, the novel has generated praise from The New Yorker, The Christian Science Monitor and others, as well as being selected for several top reading lists. It was published as “The Zookeeper of Belfast” by Hodder/Hachette (the UK, the Commonwealth and Ireland) in April 2021 (and forthcoming in December 2021). The novel will be translated for foreign editions in Romania, Norway and Iran. Walsh is now working on a second novel inspired by events that took place in Detroit during the 1930s and 1940s.
Over the years, her fiction, essays and book reviews have been published in the New York Times Book Review, the Virginia Quarterly Review, Story Quarterly, Guernica, Longreads, Virginia Quarterly Review, San Francisco Chronicle and Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. She has been a resident at Ucross, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Ragdale and Yaddo.