Colm Maher:"I recently took Hemingway's novel Fiesta with me to Cuba, reading it in the place Hemingway lived the last 20 years of his life. This was my third time reading it. I bought my first copy in a small bookshop in Paris, having just hitched from Amsterdam. I was 23. A friend and myself were working our way around Europe. It was a perfect book to find at that age, all about the lost generation in 1920s Paris, told through the mood swings of its young narrator, Jake Barnes.

“Since then I like to bring the right book when I travel, and Hemingway has featured more than most. Next was a trip to the south of Spain, where I once again got lost in the extremities of Jake’s world: the bitter lows amid the partying in the Parisian metropolis, the quiet grandeur of a fishing expedition high in the Spanish mountains and the madness of the fiesta in Pamplona. Every time I reread it I find more to enjoy in Hemingway’s finely structured sentences.

“I last closed the book in a hotel in beautiful, crumbling Havana and ritualistically ordered a mojito and lit a cigar, by now a sad Hemingway fan. I look forward to the next time.”

Colm Maher’s new play, Last Shot Redemption, runs at St Nicholas’s Collegiate Church, as part of Galway Arts Festival, from Monday until July 22nd