Three Sisters

Lucy Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981 and is the author of four novels, several stage plays and radio dramas, and three previous collections of short stories: Multitudes, Intimacies and Openings. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2018, she was the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories in 2019. She won the BBC National Short Story Award in 2021 for 'All the People Were Mean and Bad'. Other awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the George Devine Award, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the Walter Scott Prize and the 2022 E. M. Forster Award. Anton Chekhov, Russian dramatist and short-story writer, was born in 1860, the son of a grocer and the grandson of a serf. After graduating in medicine from Moscow University in 1884, he began to make his name in the theatre with the one-act comedies The Bear, The Proposal and The Wedding. His earliest full-length plays, Ivanov (1887) and The Wood Demon (1889), were not successful, and The Seagull, produced in 1896, was a failure until a triumphant revival by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1898. This was followed by Uncle Vanya (1899), Three Sisters (1901) and The Cherry Orchard (1904), shortly after the production of which Chekhov died. The first English translations of his plays were performed within five years of his death.