Who writes here

Sarah grew up in Bloomfield on the east side of the city and writes about food the way most people in Belfast talk about it — slowly, and with a lot of mention of who used to do it better. She started a blog about her Saturday hauls from St George's Market in 2014 and slid sideways into restaurant writing without ever quite calling herself a critic.

She knows the Cathedral Quarter rooms by their first owners. She still rates her granny's wheaten loaf above anything she's eaten in a fine-dining room, and she'll say so. Her real interest is the cooks who quietly built Belfast's food scene back up after the city centre opened out — the stallholders, the bakers, the second-generation owners now running the family pub.

She doesn't pretend to know wine. She does know who to ring on a Saturday afternoon if a table's needed.

Connor lives a five-minute walk from the Strand in Portstewart. He used to run trips for an outdoor centre on the North Coast — surfing, coasteering, the occasional misjudged hike — and now writes about the same beaches and hills he was getting people up and down for a wage.

Some routes here are easier than they sound, and some are quietly harder. He got benighted on Slieve Donard one wet March about ten years back and learned to leave more daylight than seems reasonable. His notes on walks tend to dwell on the boring bits: where the wind hits hardest, which gate is missing a hinge, where the second tide-cut leaves you a half-hour to get back.

He's not a working guide any more, technically. But if it's blowing a Force 6 from the south-west, he'll still tell you to do Mussenden the other way around.

Aoife is from Derry and reads more about Derry than is probably healthy. She did postgraduate work on early medieval Ulster at Queen's, spent a few years at the Tower Museum, and now writes for a living — which means the books keep coming home anyway.

She has the historian's vice of qualifying everything. Dates in her pieces often arrive with an annoyed parenthesis: the Annals of Ulster say 568, the Four Masters say 565, take your pick. She thinks the city's history is more interesting than the version most visitors arrive with — which she means kindly.

Her writing leans toward the medieval and the early modern: Columban monasticism, the Plantation period, the walled-city years. She'll happily admit when something is contested or genuinely unknown.

James grew up on a beef farm outside Cullybackey and never quite left rural Antrim, even when work pulled him toward Belfast for a stretch. He writes about the people in the countryside who make things — cheese, cider, whiskey, instruments, baskets, music — and he tends to know them by their first names, and their parents' first names too.

His pieces lean toward producers and the small, hard-to-Google places: the back-room fiddle session on a Wednesday night, the cheesemaker who'll show you the cave if you ring ahead, the orchard you can pick from if you ask the right person at the gate. He spends a lot of time in cars between farms.