BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Irish Literary Society - ECPv6.18.2//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:Irish Literary Society X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Irish Literary Society REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20190331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20191027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20200329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20201025T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20210328T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20211031T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20220327T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20221030T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20230326T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20231029T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20240331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20241027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20250330T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20251026T010000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:UTC BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:UTC DTSTART:20130101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20241125T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20241125T210000 DTSTAMP:20241121T082824Z CREATED:20241111T111157Z LAST-MODIFIED:20241121T082824Z UID:20632-1732563000-1732568400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Neil Jordan - 25 Nov DESCRIPTION:Neil Jordan is unique in his success both as a fiction writer and a movie maker. In his new memoir Amnesiac he looks back over his twin careers with a certain amused wonderment – how did he manage all that? The result is a fascinating record of private loves and losses\, of public triumphs and lessons learned\, in a narrative shaped by the hand of an artist. And yes\, there is enough insider Hollywood lore to satisfy the hungriest picturegoer. He is joined in conversation by film and theatre critic Daniel Rosenthal. \nNeil Jordan is the creative mind behind the films Angel\, Mona Lisa\, Michael Collins\, The Crying Game\, and Interview with the Vampire\, and novels such as The Past and Night in Tunisia. Jordan will explore his past and family history: from growing up near an abandoned estate in Dublin\, to his passion for music and early productions with Jim Sheridan. Hear stories of his collaborations with Stephen Rea\, Jaye Davidson\, Bob Hoskins\, and Tom Cruise\, and reflections on loss\, love\, creativity\, and even the supernatural by one of Ireland’s most unusual artists. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/neil-jordan-25-nov/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:America,biography,book signing,film,history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/jordan-banner.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20241111T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20241111T210000 DTSTAMP:20241030T202659Z CREATED:20241029T121234Z LAST-MODIFIED:20241030T202659Z UID:20566-1731353400-1731358800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Charlotte Brontë - 11 November DESCRIPTION:Charlotte Brontë\, who dazzled the world with some of literature’s most vital and richly-drawn characters\, spent her brief but extraordinary life in search of love. She eventually found it with Arthur Bell\, a reserved yet passionate Irishman. After marrying\, the pair honeymooned in Ireland – a glimmer of happiness in a life shadowed by tragedy. \n\nWe’re delighted to welcome Martina Devlin to discuss her enthralling new novel Charlotte . It weaves back and forth through Charlotte’s life\, reflecting on the myths built around her by those who knew her\, those who thought they knew her\, and those who longed to know her. Above all\, this is a story of fiction: who creates it\, who lives it\, who owns it. Martina will be in conversation with Dr. Ailsa Grant Ferguson. The event will reflect on the writing and responsibilities of biographical fiction and consider Martina’s research and wider experience in writing about historical figures. \n\nBrontë died just nine months into her marriage to Bell. Her genius\, and the aura of mystery surrounding her\, meant she’d been mythologised even within her own lifetime – a process which only intensified after her death. Observed through the eyes of Mary Nicholls – who encountered Charlotte on that fateful journey to Ireland\, and who went on to wed her widower Arthur – Charlotte is a story of three lives irrevocably intertwined. Bound by passion and obsession\, friendship and loss\, loyalty and deception – this a story of Brontë’s short but pivotal time in Ireland as never before told. \n\n\n\n Speakers: Martina Devlin\n\n\n\n Martina Devlin\nMartina Devlin is a bestselling author and award-winning journalist\, having published ten books to date. Devlin has won numerous awards for both her writing and journalism\, including the Hennessy Literary Award 1996\, GALA columnist of the year 2010\, National Newspapers of Ireland columnist of the year 2011 and Royal Society of Literature’s V.S. Pritchett short story award 2012. She was also Writer-in-Residence at the Princess Grace Irish Library in Monaco in 2009. She has been shortlisted three times for the Irish Book of the Year awards\, and her non-fiction account of the Irish financial collapse\, Banksters\, co-authored with David Murphy\, topped the best-seller list for eight weeks. A former Fleet Street journalist\, she writes weekly current affairs columns for the Irish Independent and has been named National Newspapers of Ireland columnist of the year. She frequently chairs literary and current affairs events and is a regular commentator on BBC and RTÉ. She was born in Omagh and lives in Dublin. \n\nDr Ailsa Grant Ferguson\n\n\n\n Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson\nDr Grant Ferguson is Co-Director of the Centre for Memory\, Narrative and Histories and leads the Performance and Communities Research and Enterprise Group. Dr Ailsa Grant Ferguson’s research is interdisciplinary\, focusing across early modern English literature and cultural history and their afterlives in 20th and 21st century contexts. She is an elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a current AHRC Research\, Development and Engagement Fellow. Her work focuses on literary histories\, especially Shakespeare in performance and cultural contexts\, performance and gender\, literary commemoration\, heritage and cultural memory\, and early modern women’s writing and its afterlives and mediation. \n\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/charlotte-bronte-11-november/ LOCATION:Art Workers Guild\, 6 Queen Square\,\, London\, WC1N 3AT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,emigration,feminism,history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/devlin-banner-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20240325T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20240325T210000 DTSTAMP:20240309T154923Z CREATED:20240303T125231Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240309T154923Z UID:20254-1711395000-1711400400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Molly Keane - 25 March DESCRIPTION:This event brings together the poets Thomas McCarthy and Virginia Keane Brownlow in conversation with Dorothy Allen to reflect on the life and writing of Molly Keane. Molly Keane was born Molly Skrine in Co Kildare in 1904\, part of what she herself described as “a rather serious hunting\, fishing church going family”. Her mother\, Moira O’Neill was a well known writer\, called the “Poetess of the Glens” and Keane herself published The Knights of Cheerful Countenance in 1926 when she was just seventeen. She used the name of M.J Farrell as a pen name\, reputedly a name she had taken from a pub she spotted one day while out hunting. For Keane\, the male name became a screen for her literary work\, a necessary self protection within the distinctly unliterary anti-intellectual hunting world of the Anglo-Irish in the 1920’s. Comic novels like Young Entry\, (1928)\, Mad Puppetstown\, (1931)\, Devoted Ladies (1934) and Full House\, (1935) established her reputation\, as did her most dramatic novel of the Irish war of Independence\, Two Days in Aragon\, published in 1941. At the same time\, Molly Keane was also a successful dramatist in London’s West End\, working with John Gielgud between 1938 and 1961 to produce a series of commercial hits. After the death of her husband and the failure of a play in 1961\, Molly Keane moved back to Ardmore\, Co Waterford with her two daughters and gave up writing as M.J. Farrell. Finally\, in 1981\, she published\, under her own name\, the novel that is considered her masterpiece\, Good Behaviour and found new inspiration as a novelist in her old age with later novels such as Time After Time\, (1983) and Loving and Giving (1988). Molly Keane died in 1996. \n\nIMAGE: MOLLY KEANE AT VARDMORE IN 1945\, PAINTED BY NORAH MCGUINNESS\nTicket £8 >\n Speakers: Thomas McCarthy\n\n\n\n Tom McCarthy\nThomas McCarthy was educated at University College Cork and worked for many years at Cork City Libraries. His published collections include The First Convention\, The Sorrow Garden\, Lost Province\, Merchant Prince and The Last Geraldine Officer. His Pandemonium\, 2016\, was short-listed for the Irish Times/Poetry Now Award and his new collection\, Prophecy\, was published by Carcanet Press UK in April 2019. Awards include The Patrick Kavanagh Award\, The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize\, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Annual Literary Award of the Ireland Funds. His prose-book\, Poetry\, Memory and the Party\, was published by Gallery Press in 2021. McCarthy was a friend of Molly Keane and remains a great champion of her work. He is a member of Aosdána. \n\nVirginia Keane Brownlow\n\n\n\n Virginia Keane Brownlow\nVirginia Keane Brownlow is a poet\, daughter of Molly Keane and grand-daughter of Moira O’Neill the Celtic Revival poet. In 2009 Virginia created The Molly Keane Writers’ Retreat with the writers Lani O’Hanlon and Thomas McCarthy. \n\n\nDorothy Allen\n\n\n\n Dorothy Allen\nDorothy Allen is an award winning journalist\, currently the London correspondent of Swiss magazine Tierwelt. She is a former BBC reporter\, working in documentary programmes for television (Brass Tacks; Panorama) and radio (File on Four). As a print journalist\, she won a Feature Writer of the Year award while reporting for the Burton Daily Mail. She has also written a weekly television review column for The Tablet magazine. Dorothy is a former Vice Chair of the Irish Literary Society. \n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/molly-keane-25-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Molly-Keane.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20220929T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220929T203000 DTSTAMP:20220911T144959Z CREATED:20220707T112204Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220911T144959Z UID:19287-1664479800-1664483400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Irish Texts Society / ILS Annual Lecture - 29 September DESCRIPTION:The scholar Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. Her subject is Thomas O’Connor (alias Tomás Ó Conchubhair\, b. 1798)\, originally from the civil parish of Templemolaga\, Co. Cork\, he emigrated to London in 1820 where he worked as a tailor until his death around 1870. \nThe evidence in extant Irish manuscripts suggests that he had already begun working as a scribe in his native home place\, but that this role progressed significantly during his years in the Victorian city. His scribal material (in Irish and in English) provides an intriguing insight into a native man of letters who appears to have integrated himself into his host society\, while at the same time preserving a distinctive Irish identity. Moreover\, his fascinating collection of correspondence in English reveals a man with informed views about the language and literature of his native country. And\, in his thirty or so poetic compositions\, personal vignettes come to the fore as well as a great admiration for the Young Ireland movement and\, in particular\, for William Smith O’Brien\, the fair-haired boy (an buachaill bán). \nNí Úrdail first discovered O’Connor while conducting research some years ago on a text known in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish manuscripts as Leabhar Oiris (Book of History)\, which is essentially an encomium of the O’Briens of Thomond and this dynasty’s battles for supremacy in Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries. She was intrigued to discover that of this work’s twenty-six sources\, one was completed outside Ireland in 1848 by O’Connor “in the city of London” (a ccathair Londoine). Subsequent findings have uncovered eighteen extant manuscripts written entirely or in part by this Cork scribe when he was living in London\, and these are preserved today in the National Library of Ireland\, the Royal Irish Academy\, University College Cork\, NUI Galway and St. Malachy’s College\, Belfast. A further source containing O’Connor’s Irish translation of the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost (written about the year 1860) is now lost\, but a copy may be consulted on microfilm. In looking through old MSS\, which I purchased in Dublin a good number of years ago\, I find a translation into Irish of the 1st Book of Paradise Lost. It is by one Thomas O’Connor\, who\, from letters accompanying it\, seems to have been a tailor\, resident for many years in London…Letter 23 December 1893\, from Monsignor James O’Laverty to Fr Eugene O’Growney \n  \nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n  \n  \n  \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: \nProfessor Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail\n\nMeidhbhín Ní Úrdail is Professor in\, and Head of Modern Irish at University College Dublin. Ní Úrdail’s areas of research include the Irish manuscript tradition; Ireland’s vernacular written tradition from medieval times to the nineteenth century; narrative discourse and historical representation; the complementary relationship between script and print in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland; and contemporary Irish writing and its heritage. Her most recent monograph\, Pádraig Ó Laoghaire (1870–1896): an Irish scholar from the Béarra Peninsula\, was published by Beara Historical Society (2021). URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/irish-texts-society-ils-annual-lecture-29-september/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,emigration,exile,Irish language,lecture,London-Irish ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/its_ils_2022.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20220909T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20220909T210000 DTSTAMP:20220909T220842Z CREATED:20190413T191332Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220909T220842Z UID:11596-1662751800-1662757200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Essaying the Body\, Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - 5 June DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine join the ILS to discuss their recent books of essays. Pine’s winning last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year seemed to mark a reemergence of the essay form in Irish literature. Perhaps the flourishing of literary journals in Ireland has encouraged this\, perhaps the renewed appreciation of Hubert Butler’s work has been an influence\, certainly his cosmopolitan sensibility is present in the recent creative non-fiction of Brian Dillon\, Kevin Breathnach\, Ian Maleney… I’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question\, each dilemma\, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone\, especially young women and men\, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.Martina Evans in the Irish Times on Notes to Self\n  \nThe personal essays of Pine and Gleeson share the ambition of those authors\, yet move inward reflecting on their own bodily traumas and the politics of the female body in Ireland in the last 50 years. In its variously raw\, funny\, acute manner Pine’s vivid collection addresses addiction\, fertility\, feminism\, sexual violence and depression. The formal experimentation of Gleeson’s Constellations is startling\, throughout this intimate account of pain is illuminating of art and the wider world. \n \n  \nSpeaker: Sinéad Gleeson\n\n\n \nSinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays\, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta\, Winter Papers and Gorse\, and a story of hers will appear in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short story anthologies\, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland\, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is working on a novel. \n  \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Dr Emilie Pine\n\n\n \nEmilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies\, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave\, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance\, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press\, 2019). Her first collection of personal essays\, Notes to Self\, was published by Tramp Press (2018). \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/essaying_the_body/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,feminism,history,interview,lecture,medical,nature,Reading,research,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/essaying-the-body.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T210000 DTSTAMP:20220222T151730Z CREATED:20220128T200452Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220222T151730Z UID:18798-1646076600-1646082000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Kinsella\, a celebration - 28 Feb DESCRIPTION:2021 saw the passing of the brothers Thomas (1928-2021) and John Kinsella (1932-2021). Our event will look back over their careers as poet and composer and include music and readings. \nThomas is credited with bringing the techniques of international modernism to Irish verse. He published his first collection\, The Starlight Eye (1952)\, with Dolmen Press\, helping to set the type himself. He translated extensively from Irish\, most notably the Old Irish epic An Táin Bó Cuailgne\, published as An Táin (1969) and An Duanaire—Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). In 1972\, he founded the Peppercanister Press to publish Butcher’s Dozen. The pamphlet poem was written in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday\, following the Widgery report which whitewashed the atrocities\, and published on 26 April 1972.His awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award (1966\, 1969\, 1992). He taught in the US for many years and initiated and administered the Irish Tradition study program in Dublin until 1992. He long lived in County Wicklow\, Ireland\, but spent recent years living in Philadelphia. He passed away in Dublin in December of 2021. \nJohn composed both choral and vocal works\, his primary interest was in instrumental music\, and his most distinguished work is to be found in his string quartets\, concertos and particularly his symphonies. He was Ireland’s most prolific symphonist during the twentieth century. \nJoining us to read and discuss the poetry of Thomas Kinsella are Bernard O’Donoghue\, Martina Evans\, John Mcauliffe\, James Conor Patterson\, Derval Turbidy – further speakers to be announced. David Daly will play from John Kinsella’s compositions for Double Bass and talk about working with John and his place in the life of classical music in Ireland. The evening will also comprise a full reading of Thomas Kinsella’s 1972 poem ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ – the reissue by Carcanet will be launched on the night.\n\nPlaces are reserved for paid-up members of the Society\, tickets are available to purchase for £10 below for all others.\nIMAGE CREDIT: Image from The Táin. ‘Army massing’ by Louis le Brocquy. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/kinsella-a-celebration-28-feb/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,biography,Border,history,Irish language,music,musicology,poetry ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Kinsella_slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211208T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211208T210000 DTSTAMP:20211129T132341Z CREATED:20211124T131829Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211129T132341Z UID:18732-1638991800-1638997200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Brian Moore at 100 - 8 Dec DESCRIPTION:To mark the centenary of the birth of Belfast-born writer Brian Moore (1921-1999) Brian Moore at 100 and the Irish Literary Society have partnered to screen The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (7 December) and deliver tonight’s talk with Dr Sinéad Moynihan and Lucy Caldwell. \n\nDesigned to coincide with the centenary of his birth\, the Exeter University project has sought to critically appraise\, and thus revive scholarly and public interest in\, the work of neglected and important Belfast-born writer\, Brian Moore (1921- 1999). Moore was the author of twenty-six novels in diverse genres and a transnational subject who lived most of his adult life in Canada and the U.S. Our talk and the project more generally invite and stimulate a fresh look at Moore’s multi-genre literary career.\n\nSpeaker: Lucy Caldwell\n\n\n \nCaldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels and several stage plays and radio dramas. Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature\, the Dylan Thomas Prize\, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright\, the BBC Stewart Parker Award\, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her debut collection of short stories\, Multitudes\, was published by Faber in 2016\, of it she has written ‘…the music of Van Morrison in general and of Astral Weeks in particular is something of a guiding spirit to my stories.’ Lucy is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber\, 2019); she is the 2021 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award for her story ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad‘.Lucy Caldwell will publish her long-awaited fourth novel These Days in March 2022. \n\nSpeaker: Professor Sinéad Moynihan\n\n\n\nProfessor Sinéad Moynihan is an American Studies specialist her research interests include Transatlantic Literary Studies and\, particularly\, the Irish Atlantic. Her third monograph\, Ireland\, Migration and Return Migration: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination\, 1952 to Present was published by Liverpool UP in March 2019 and was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies. She is the co-investigator on the British Academy / Leverhulme funded project\, Brian Moore at 100.\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/brian-moore-at-100/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:adaptation,America,anniversary,Belfast,biography,documentary,interview,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/moore-conversation-slider-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211025T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211025T210000 DTSTAMP:20211018T120253Z CREATED:20211014T104732Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211018T120253Z UID:18417-1635190200-1635195600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Gail McConnell and Stephen Sexton - 25 October DESCRIPTION:  \n\n\n\nTo kick off the 2021 ILS season and welcome everyone back to physically present meetings we are delighted to be at the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith to give a London launch to two new poetry volumes from Stephen Sexton and Gail McConnell. We’ll also be featuring the Irish Poets in the UK edition of the Agenda poetry magazine with a reading from John O’Donoghue. \nGail McConnell joins us to read from her new collection The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins\, 2021). Her book pieces through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of her father\, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Flitting between a child and adult self\, this startling\, innovative debut charts the experience of going through the box\, as the poems attempt to decode the past and present\, and piece together a history\, and a life. Our President\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, comments: ‘She is now one of the crucial public writers.’  \n\n‘The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant\, from Wendy Houses\, to the very hairs of your head\, to the poetry of First Aid instructions\, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking — sometimes pain-making work — making the words fit the columns\, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book\, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses.’ CIARAN CARSON \n\n   \n\nHis pen is fantastical. Cheryl (of the title)\, tarot card clairvoyant\, is conjured out of thin air. She flourishes alongside many other sleights of hand and vanishing acts: there is no knot Sexton cannot slip… many of his phrases are so good I wanted to steal them…Sexton makes the world bearable with poetry as his intercessor. KATE KELLAWAY\, The Observer. \n\n\nStephen Sexton joins us to read from his new collection Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin\, 2021). It is the decade of centuries\, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo\, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley\, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive\, playful\, dream-like poems\, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present\, while Cheryl translates from the future\, showing us how we exist in all three at once. Reckoning with both public and private tragedies\, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One\, the poems range across old Europe: ‘Edelweiss’ and Titanic setting sail\, to a transatlantic\, cross-century symposium in Part Two\, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through\, it’s practically always the anniversary of something terrible\, but there’s always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards. A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear\, Cheryl’s Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize for Best First Collection-winning If All the World and Love Were Young\, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today. \n\n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n\nSpeaker: Gail McConnell\n\n\n \nGail McConnell is a writer and critic from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears\, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press\, 2018). A programme based on Fothermather was produced by Conor Garrett for Radio 4 in 2020 and made available as a Seriously… podcast. Gail’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review\, PN Review\, Virginia Quarterly Review\, Blackbox Manifold and Stand\, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave\, 2014). Gail’s writing interests include violence\, creatureliness\, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. \nSpeaker: Stephen Sexton\n\n\n \nStephen Sexton’s first book\, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University\, Belfast. \n \nSpeaker: John O’Donoghue\n\n\n \nJohn O’Donoghue is the author of a memoir Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray 2009) which was awarded Mind Book Of The Year in 2010. His poetry collections include Letter To Lord Rochester (Waterloo Press\, 2004); The Beach Generation (Pighog Press\, 2007); and Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press\, 2009). John lives in Brighton and teaches Creative Writing. He will be reading from his work in the ‘Irish Poets in the UK’ edition of Agenda. \nChair: James Conor Patterson\n\n\n \nJames Conor Patterson is the editor of the upcoming anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021) which will be the focus of our 15 November event. He is also author of the poetry collection ‘Bandit Country’ forthcoming from Picador in Autumn 2022. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian\, i-D\, The Irish Times\, Magma\, The Moth\, Morning Star\, New Statesman\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Poetry London\, Poetry Review\, RTÉ Culture\, The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine\, among others. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/gail-mcconnell-and-stephen-sexton-25-october/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Belfast,biography,book signing,crime,documentary,poetry,politics,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/mcconnel-sexton-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20210624T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20210624T193000 DTSTAMP:20210616T233735Z CREATED:20210616T215934Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210616T233735Z UID:18272-1624563000-1624563000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:A History of Irish Women's Poetry - 24 June DESCRIPTION:Join us to celebrate the launch of a new collection of essays reflecting on the history of Irish women’s poetry with the editors Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. The new Cambridge University Press volume offers a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women’s poetry from earliest times to the present day. Joining the editors will be the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\, one of the major Irish poets writing over the past 50 years\, and the author of the chapter on her work\, the academic Maria Johnston. \n\nThe editors\, both literary scholars and award-winning poets in their own right\, will discuss their shaping the volume and its reading of Irish women’s poetry through many prisms – mythology\, gender\, history\, the nation – and most importantly\, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures\, such as Maire Mhac an tSaoi\, Eavan Boland\, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain\, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered\, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women’s poetry has been produced and received\, from the anonymous work of the early modern period\, through the bardic age\, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland\, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland\, the Irish Literary Revival\, and the advent of modernity. The volume and our event seeks to give an answer to the question posed by Ní Chuilleanáin in an essay on Speranza from 2000: ‘what use our female predecessors are to us as writers\, what is the function of model\, teacher\, exemplar?’ \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\n\n\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson\, she was a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week. \n\nSpeaker: Ailbhe Darcy\n\n\n \nDr Ailbhe Darcy’s most recent collection of poetry is Insistence\, published in June 2018 with Bloodaxe Books\, which won Wales Book of the Year and the Piggott Prize for Poetry in association with Listowel Writers’ Week. Her previous collection with Bloodaxe are Imaginary Menagerie (2011). A poetic text in collaboration with S.J. Fowler\, Subcritical Tests (2017)\, published by Gorse Editions\, and a chapbook\, A Fictional Dress (2009)\, published by Tall Lighthouse. In February 2020 she presented Alphabet on BBC Radio 4\, a programme about Inger Christensen’s extraordinary poem alfabet and its resonance in the age of climate change\, produced by Megan Jones. Darcy is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University. \n\nSpeaker: Maria Johnston\n\n\n \nDr. Maria Johnston received her Doctorate in English Literature in 2007 and has since worked as a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin\, the Mater Dei Institute (DCU) and Oxford University. She is a well-known poetry critic and her reviews and essays have appeared in a range of publications including the Guardian\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Edinburgh Review\, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. She is the co-editor of Reading Pearse Hutchinson (Irish Academic Press\, 2011) and is currently working on a book on contemporary Irish poetry. Her recent archival discoveries on the poet Ethna McCarthy were featured in the Irish Times.\n\n\nSpeaker: David Wheatley\n Wheatley is a poet and critic whose most recent poetry collection is The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet/Wake Forest UP\, 2017). He has published four previous collections with Gallery Press: Thirst (1997; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature)\, Misery Hill (2000)\, Mocker (2006)\, and A Nest on the Waves (2010). Wheatley’s critical work has appeared in numerous edited collections\, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012)\, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013)\, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). He was a founding editor of the poetry journal Metre\, and has written on poetry for a variety of other journals. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/a-history-of-irish-womens-poetry-24-june/ CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,Irish language,poetry,publishing,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/banner-crowdcast-Irish-women.png LOCATION:https://www.crowdcast.io/e/a-history-of-irish-womens-poetry END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T203000 DTSTAMP:20200506T162247Z CREATED:20200126T115034Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200506T162247Z UID:16793-1589311800-1589315400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:ILS / Irish Texts Society Annual lecture - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. \nThe scholar Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. Her subject is Thomas O’Connor (alias Tomás Ó Conchubhair\, b. 1798)\, originally from the civil parish of Templemolaga\, Co. Cork\, he emigrated to London in 1820 where he worked as a tailor until his death around 1870. \nThe evidence in extant Irish manuscripts suggests that he had already begun working as a scribe in his native home place\, but that this role progressed significantly during his years in the Victorian city. His scribal material (in Irish and in English) provides an intriguing insight into a native man of letters who appears to have integrated himself into his host society\, while at the same time preserving a distinctive Irish identity. Moreover\, his fascinating collection of correspondence in English reveals a man with informed views about the language and literature of his native country. And\, in his thirty or so poetic compositions\, personal vignettes come to the fore as well as a great admiration for the Young Ireland movement and\, in particular\, for William Smith O’Brien\, the fair-haired boy (an buachaill bán). \n  \nNí Úrdail first discovered O’Connor while conducting research some years ago on a text known in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish manuscripts as Leabhar Oiris (Book of History)\, which is essentially an encomium of the O’Briens of Thomond and this dynasty’s battles for supremacy in Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries. She was intrigued to discover that of this work’s twenty-six sources\, one was completed outside Ireland in 1848 by O’Connor “in the city of London” (a ccathair Londoine). Subsequent findings have uncovered eighteen extant manuscripts written entirely or in part by this Cork scribe when he was living in London\, and these are preserved today in the National Library of Ireland\, the Royal Irish Academy\, University College Cork\, NUI Galway and St. Malachy’s College\, Belfast. A further source containing O’Connor’s Irish translation of the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost (written about the year 1860) is now lost\, but a copy may be consulted on microfilm. In looking through old MSS\, which I purchased in Dublin a good number of years ago\, I find a translation into Irish of the 1st Book of Paradise Lost. It is by one Thomas O’Connor\, who\, from letters accompanying it\, seems to have been a tailor\, resident for many years in London…Letter 23 December 1893\, from Monsignor James O’Laverty to Fr Eugene O’Growney \n\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n  \n \nSpeaker: Associate Professor Meidhbhín Ní ÚrdailMeidhbhín Ní Úrdail is Associate Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin. Ní Úrdail’s areas of research include the Irish manuscript tradition; Ireland’s vernacular written tradition from medieval times to the nineteenth century; narrative discourse and historical representation; the complementary relationship between script and print in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland; and contemporary Irish writing and its heritage. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ils-irish-texts-society-annual-lecture/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,history,Irish language,lecture,London-Irish,poetry,politics,research,social history,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/its_ils_2020-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191125T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191125T203000 DTSTAMP:20200203T214611Z CREATED:20190915T181936Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200203T214611Z UID:12390-1574710200-1574713800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Polly Devlin\, Writing Home - 25 Nov DESCRIPTION:Polly Devlin joins Joan Bakewell to discuss the latest collection of her work\, Writing Home\, and to reflect on a rich career as a writer\, her working as features editor of Vogue in London in the Swinging Sixties\, to encounters with Bob Dylan\, Janis Joplin\, Barbara Streisand\, John Lennon…In the pieces brought together in Writing Home\, Polly Devlin OBE\, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where\, in the late 1950s\, the first electricity poles looked ‘literally out of place’); her sudden transition\, at the age of twenty-one\, to Swinging Sixties London\, where she worked for Vogue and became very much part of the scene (although – ‘it’s like being a provincial at Versailles’)\, on to New York\, back to London\, then to the English countryside\, and to Paris\, Venice\, the world over – and always back to Ireland\, London and New York. \nShe writes about the people she has known\, among them Yoko Ono\, Mick Jagger\, Peggy Guggenheim\, Diana Vreeland (‘as fantastical as a unicorn’)\, Jean Shrimpton (‘she looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance’)\, Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up\, ‘which I gabbled she didn’t need to – she looked at me frostily and the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid’). And she writes about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration\, feminism (‘I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and women were secondary’)\, reading\, writing\, collecting\, shopping\, houses\, dogs\, rooks\, hares\, dreams\, friendship and the kindness of strangers; about daughters and mothers. \n \n \n\n“…affectionate sketches of friends including Nuala O’Faolain and her brother-in-law Seamus Heaney…ring with truth and tenderness.”Irish Times\n\nThe event will be followed by a book sale and signing by the author. \n  \nOur thanks to the publishers of Writing Home: \n  \n\nSpeaker: Joan Bakewell\n\n\nJoan Bakewell has a distinguished career as an author\, journalist and broadcaster. She has served on the board of the National Theatre and as Chair of the British Film Institute and of the National Campaign for the Arts. Joan was made a CBE is 1999 and Dame in 2008. In January 2011 she took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport. In April 2013\, she became President of Birkbeck College.She has led some of the BBC’s most well-remembered documentaries and news programmes\, challenging taboos around sex; examining religion from a critical\, objective standpoint; and being a champion for arts and culture and their relevance to life. \n\n  \nSpeaker: Polly Devlin\n\n\nPolly Devlin is a writer\, broadcaster and filmmaker. She holds an OBE for services to literature. After spending her childhood in Northern Ireland\, at the age of twenty-two she took up her first job – as a writer\, and soon features editor\, on British Vogue\, at the heart of 1960s London. A couple of years later she was again transported\, to New York\, to work for Diana Vreeland on American Vogue – where\, once more\, she was very much part of the scene she wrote about in her newspaper column and articles including for The Sunday Times\, New Statesman and Observer. Her first book\, All of Us There\, is now a Virago Modern Classic. The most recent\, New York: Places to Write Home About (Pimpernel Press\, 2017; published in the United States by Gibbs Smith\, as New York: Behind Closed Doors) was greeted with delight on both sides of the Atlantic. She now divides her time between London and New York\, where\, until her recent retirement\, she taught Creative Non-Fiction at Barnard College\, Columbia University. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/polly-devlin-writing-home-25-nov/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,exile,feminism,interview,Reading,research,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/polly-devlin-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191120T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191120T200000 DTSTAMP:20211015T045046Z CREATED:20190915T202447Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T045046Z UID:12407-1574272800-1574280000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Michael Wood\, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen - 20 Nov DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is delighted to announce that the speaker for this year’s Annual Yeats Lecture will be Professor Michael Wood. Drawing on his book Yeats and Violence (2010) Professor Wood reflects on how poetry\, seen through the instance of a single poem\, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none\, and also\, in certain crucial cases\, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W.B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilisation crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history’s victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? One hundred years on from the historical setting of the poem we have asked Wood to consider the poem in its historical context and its place in Yeats’ work. Wood will then join our Vice President\, Roy Foster\, in conversation and the poet Martina Evans will offer a poem\, commissioned for this event\, in response to Yeats’ work. “The appeal to the dream has all kinds of echoes in Yeats…we might think the dream justifies the dreamer\, since that is part of the argument of ‘Easter 1916’\, and this is the argument the speaker of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ helplessly gestures towards: ‘We know their dream\,’ the earlier poem says\, ‘enough/To know they dreamed and are dead.’ This particular dream had its price\, even apart from the death of the dreamers. It turned hearts to stone\, it was part of the old myth of sacrifice Yeats himself used to be so eloquent about.” \n \nWood’s criticism is exuberantly characterful\, adventurous in its scholarship\, and greedily\, giddily speculative. Leo Robson\, New Statesman\n \n \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Michael Wood\n\nMichael Wood was born and educated in England but has worked for much of his life in the United States\, first at Columbia University and then at Princeton. He has written books on Luis Buñuel\, Franz Kafka\, Vladimir Nabokov\, and Gabriel García Márquez\, as well as The Road to Delphi\, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. Among his other works are America in the Movies and Children of Silence. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature\, a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences\, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Selected Works: Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies (1975\, 1989); The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1994); Children of Silence: on Contemporary Fiction (1998); The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003); Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005) and Yeats and Violence (2010). \n  \nSpeaker: Martina Evans\n Martina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Her latest collection Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement\, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Currently she is Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and poetry reviewer for the Irish Times. \n \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Roy Foster Roy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914.\n Image above shows detail from Jack B Yeats’ Something in the Air\, 1948. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/michael-wood-nineteen-hundred-and-nineteen-20-nov/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:art,biography,history,lecture,poetry,politics,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-yeats_lecture.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190605T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000 DTSTAMP:20190604T084909Z CREATED:20190319T153508Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190604T084909Z UID:11402-1559763000-1559766600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Essaying the Body: Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - 5 June DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine join the ILS to discuss their recent books of essays. Pine’s winning last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year seemed to mark a reemergence of the essay form in Irish literature. Perhaps the flourishing of literary journals in Ireland has encouraged this\, perhaps the renewed appreciation of Hubert Butler’s work has been an influence\, certainly his cosmopolitan sensibility is present in the recent creative non-fiction of Brian Dillon\, Kevin Breathnach\, Ian Maleney… \n\nI’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question\, each dilemma\, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone\, especially young women and men\, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.Martina Evans in the Irish Times on Notes to Self\n \n\nThe personal essays of Pine and Gleeson share the ambition of those authors\, yet move inward reflecting on their own bodily traumas and the politics of the female body in Ireland in the last 50 years. In its variously raw\, funny\, acute manner Pine’s vivid collection addresses addiction\, fertility\, feminism\, sexual violence and depression. The formal experimentation of Gleeson’s Constellations is startling\, throughout this intimate account of pain is illuminating of art and the wider world. \n\n\nBooks will be for sale after and the authors will be available to sign.\n\n\n \nChair: Dr Lara Feigel\n\n\n \nDr Feigel is a literary critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King’s College London. Her most recent book Free Woman is an investigation of freedom that’s part memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. It interweaves life and literature to think about motherhood\, sex\, madness and communism\, testing the gains and costs of living freely. At King’s she co-directs the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture and runs the Ivan Juritz Prize\, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms. She reviews regularly for various publications (most frequently the Guardian and the Observer). \n  \n\n \n \nSpeaker: Sinéad Gleeson\n\n\n \nSinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays\, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta\, Winter Papers and Gorse\, and a story of hers will appear in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short story anthologies\, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland\, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is working on a novel. \n  \n\n \nSpeaker: Dr Emilie Pine\n\n\n \nEmilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies\, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave\, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance\, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press\, 2019). Her first collection of personal essays\, Notes to Self\, was published by Tramp Press (2018). \n  \n\nImage above: Femme nue auprès d’une glace\, 1889 by Paul-Albert Besnard. Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art\, New York. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/essaying-the-body-sinead-gleeson-and-emilie-pine-5-june-2/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,feminism,history,interview,lecture,medical,politics,Reading,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/essaying-the-body.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190506T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190506T203000 DTSTAMP:20200126T130051Z CREATED:20190322T134608Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200126T130051Z UID:11449-1557171000-1557174600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:6 May - Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and London DESCRIPTION:Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and London: Charles Henry Wilson and Irish Literature \n\n\nThe scholar Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. O Muircheartaigh will speak on the work of Charles Henry Wilson\, an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Protestant with an interest in Irish-language literature\, who studied at Trinity College Dublin before moving to London in the 1780s to pursue the life of a writer. He would spend the rest of his life ‘struggling with adversity in London’\, but came to be a prolific journalist\, writer and translator. He would go on to edit Beauties of Edmund Burke (1798) and the papers of Henry Brooke as Brookania (1804)\, as well as writing two comedies\, Poverty and Wealth (1799) and The Irish Valet (1811). One of his most significant contributions to Irish literature was as the editor of two slim and little-known anthologies and translations of Irish-language verse (1782; 1792). Although not as sophisticated as Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry\, Wilson’s Irish anthologies have much to tell us about the nature of the interaction between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Irish literary and scribal culture in the late-eighteenth century\, in both Dublin and London. This talk will look at that interaction through the prism of Wilson’s anthologies and his collaboration with one of the most prolific and entrepreneurial Irish scribes of his time – Muiris Ó Gormáin. \nA faithful poetic translation of Pleraca na Ruarcach has since been published by Charles Wilson\, a neglected genius\, now struggling with adversity in London…Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards\, London 1786\n\n\nCharles Henry (1757–1808) \, translator and dramatist. Born in Bailieborough\, Co. Cavan\, he studied law at TCD and became a parliamentary reporter. He edited Beauties of Edmund Burke (1798) and wrote two comedies\, Poverty and Wealth (1799) and The Irish Valet (1811). He was associated with the Brooke family\, and edited the papers of Henry Brooke (Brookiana\, 2 vols.\, 1804); he anticipated Charlotte Brooke ‘s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) by several years with his Poems Translated from the Irish Language into the English (1782; 1792). Although not as sophisticated as Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry\, Wilson’s Irish anthologies have much to tell us about the nature of the interaction between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Irish literary and scribal culture in the late-eighteenth century\, in both Dublin and London. This talk will look at that interaction through the prism of Wilson’s anthologies and his collaboration with one of the most prolific and entrepreneurial Irish scribes of his time – Muiris Ó Gormáin. \n\n\n\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n\n \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Dr Peadar Ó MuircheartaighPeadar Ó Muircheartaigh is Lecturer in Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University where he teaches Gaelic languages and literature. He studied for degrees in Modern Irish and Medieval Irish at NUI Galway before undertaking postgraduate research at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Edinburgh. He has held fellowships at NUI Galway’s Moore Institute for the Humanities and at the School of Celtic Studies in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Zeuss Prize from the Societas Celtologica Europaea and in 2018 received a Charlemont Award from the Royal Irish Academy. Among his research interests are Irish literature and literary history of the long eighteenth century\, most especially Irish literary intersections with Gaelic Scotland and the relationship between print and Irish manuscript culture. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/6-may-peadar-o-muircheartaigh/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,history,Irish language,lecture,research,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/down-and-out.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000 DTSTAMP:20190412T190927Z CREATED:20190319T153727Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190412T190927Z UID:11404-1555615800-1555621200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Country Girls\, a celebration - 18 April DESCRIPTION:I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home…\n\nSo begins Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. With the support of the Dublin: One City\, One Book festival we are bringing together a fascinating panel to discuss The Country Girls trilogy as it is being celebrated in Dublin as the chosen festival book. Quite clearly we are not in Dublin but we’re delighted to extend the consideration of O’Brien’s work to London\, a city pivotal to her writing career and the setting for the last part of the trilogy. The special edition of the trilogy produced for this celebration is published by Faber & Faber and is introduced by Eimear McBride. The trilogy changed the temperature of Irish literature in the 1960s and inspired generations of readers and writers. O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than domestic and sexual servitude\, emotional disaffection and intellectual abnegation\, was nothing short of revolutionary. Not only was O’Brien giving voice to the voiceless\, she was washing the nation’s dirty laundry in public\, laundry which has proved so dirty that\, more than 50 years later\, it is still proving in need of a rinse.Eimear McBride The passion\, artistry and courage of Edna O’Brien’s vision in these novels continue to resonate into the 21st century. In addition to readings and discussion our panel will consider the role of the city in the books\, how the romantic aspects of O’Brien’s work have coloured her reception and O’Brien’s influence on younger writers. Dublin One City One Book is a Dublin City Council initiative\, led by Dublin City Public Libraries\, \n  \n\nPresented in association with the Dublin: One City One Book: \n  \n\n \n \nChair: Dr Anne Goudsmit\n\n\n \nDr Anne Goudsmit left Ireland to study at Sussex University and at the Sorbonne before moving to London. Her early career was in Finance\, when she worked at Citibank and subsequently at ITV. Anne wrote her PhD thesis on Northern Irish fiction at St Mary’s University\, Twickenham\, where she was a visiting lecturer. She is a member of the Irish Literary Society. She recently became a member of the board at the Irish Cultural Centre where she convenes a monthly Book Club. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Helen Cullen\n\n\n\nHelen Cullen is an Irish writer living in London. She worked at RTÉ for seven years before moving to London in 2010. Her debut novel\, The Lost Letters of William Woolf was published by Penguin in July 2018. Helen is now writing full-time and working on her second novel. She is also a contributor to the Irish Times newspaper and Sunday Times Magazine. Helen holds an M.A. Theatre Studies from UCD and is currently completing an M.A. English Literature at Brunel University. She was nominated as Best Newcomer in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Dr Sinéad Mooney\n\n\n \nDr Sinéad Mooney is a graduate of University College Cork and the University of Oxford. She is currently a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University\, Leicester\, where she teaches Irish literature and creative writing. Her monograph\, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press) won the 2012 American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize\, and her chapter on Edna O’Brien appeared in the recent in A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature\, edited by Clíona O’Gallchóir and Heather Ingman. She is currently working on a study of Irish women’s modernism. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Paula McGrath\n\n\n \nPaula McGrath lives in Dublin. A History of Running Away is her second novel. Her first\, Generation\, was published in 2015. She has a background in English Literature and is currently an Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland) PhD scholar at the University of Limerick. She received an Arts Council literary bursary in 2016\, and was recently Irish Writers Centre Writer-in-Residence in St Mark’s English Church\, Florence. In another life she was a yoga teacher. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-country-girls-a-celebration-18-april/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,history,interview,politics,Reading,religion,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/country-girls-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181119T060000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181119T200000 DTSTAMP:20181003T201353Z CREATED:20180912T131231Z LAST-MODIFIED:20181003T201353Z UID:10798-1542607200-1542657600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:On the Pavement Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park - 19 Nov DESCRIPTION:Lecture by Cahal Dallat with guests Ciarán Hinds and Anne-Marie Fyfe & launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project\n \nNobel-prizewinning poet\, WB Yeats\, though much inspired by Irish legend\, landscape and longing\, spent two-thirds of his youth in London\, the majority of that time in Chiswick’s Bedford Park\, the Utopian/aesthetic garden-suburb/artists’-colony whose diverse inhabitants fostered his literary talent and endeavours. Irish poet and literary critic\, Cahal Dallat\, has lived within a few blocks of the Yeats family’s two Bedford Park homes for all of his adult life and\, fascinated by the way Willie\, his father\, and his artistic siblings\, negotiated the metropolis’s social networks\, while dreaming of Sleuth Wood or Ben Bulben\, has lectured on the importance to Victorian London of Irish artists (poets\, painters\, playwrights\, composers\, and politicians\, for politics\, too\, is an art in Ireland) … and on the usefulness of London’s complex intersections and patronage to often-penniless\, in a genteel way\, exiled geniuses. In Bedford Park’s heady progressive atmosphere (and its winding if artificially villagey avenues) lay the seeds of Yeats’s genius\, not to mention contemporary theatre\, Modernist poetry and political and cultural changes that would invert the social and imperial order in the 20th century. With contributions and readings from Yeats’s letters and poems by actor Ciarán Hinds and poet Anne-Marie Fyfe.\n \nThe 2018 Irish Literary Society WB Yeats Lecture at the Embassy of Ireland launches the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project founded to mark Yeats’s role in Bedford Park and Bedford Park’s role in Yeats’s artistic development and life\, by placing a permanent artwork at the heart of this progressive\, 19c\, and beautifully preserved\, garden suburb. \nTo apply for an ILS members ticket contact the Hon. Secretary: irishlitsoc@gmail.com Image credit: Camille Pissarro\, Fete de Jubilee a Bedford Park\, 1897. \nSpeakers: Cahal DallatCahal Dallat is a poet\, musician\, critic (b. Ballycastle\, Co. Antrim)\, regular BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review contributor since 1998\, reviewer for TLS and Guardian among others\, founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project\, and Charles Causley Trust Centenary musician/poet-in-residence. Former winner of Ireland’s leading poetry prize\, the Strokestown International\, his recent awards include the 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize\, and a 2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship at University of Texas in Austin (supported by CP Snow Memorial Fund). Latest collection The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff); www.cahaldallat.com \n Ciarán Hinds \nCiarán Hinds was born in Belfast: his television roles include Gaius Julius Caesar in the series Rome and Mance Rayder in Game of Thrones while film has included the lead role in John Banville’s The Sea\, and playing opposite Daniel Day Lewis in Upton Sinclair’s There Will Be Blood.  As a stage actor his recent appearances include Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive\, Hamlet with Bendict Cumberbatch at the Barbican\, McPherson’s ‘Bob Dylan musical’ The Girl from the North Country at the Old Vic\,  and the role of Hugh O’Donnell in Brian Friel’s Translations at the National.   \n Anne-Marie Fyfe \nAfter five poetry collections including House of Small Absences (Seren\, 2015)\, poet\, arts organiser\, creative-writing teacher & former Poetry Society chair\,  Anne-Marie Fyfe\, is currently embarked on a unique Arts-Council-funded 18-month teaching/writing/performing tour\, The Voyage Out\, exploring coastal regions & lives in Britain\, Ireland\, US & Canada\, leading to a new hybrid poetry/prose/travel-writing memoir (due\, Seren\, Spring 2019). Born in Cushendall\, Co. Antrim\, Anne-Marie lives in London where she has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings & classes at London’s leading live literature venue\, the Troubadour\, since 1997. www.annemariefyfe.com URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/on-the-pavement-grey-wb-yeats-in-utopian-bedford-park-19-nov/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:architecture,biography,Collaboration,exile,history,poetry,social history,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/pavement-gray.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170921T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170921T200000 DTSTAMP:20180128T230003Z CREATED:20170812T103942Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180128T230003Z UID:9342-1506016800-1506024000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:William Trevor - 21 Sept DESCRIPTION:EMBASSY OF IRELAND event – The Embassy of Ireland has kindly reserved a number of tickets for Irish Literary Society members for its celebration of the life and work of William Trevor. Please contact the Hon. Secretary for further details. \nThe Ambassador of Ireland Mr. Adrian O’Neill\, the Trevor family and Viking Books host an evening to celebrate the life and work of William Trevor KBE at the Embassy of Ireland. The evening will feature the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li and the great cellist Steven Isserlis\, both friends and admirers of the late author. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/william-trevor-21-sept/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:biography,interview,Reading,short story,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/william-trevor-slider-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170626T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000 DTSTAMP:20171123T225429Z CREATED:20170418T182200Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T225429Z UID:9088-1498505400-1498510800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Eavan Boland - 26 June 2017 DESCRIPTION:Widely considered to be one of Ireland’s most important contemporary poets\, Eavan Boland is currently a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Stanford University\, where she has taught since 1996. In 2015 a New Collected Poems was published\, and Eavan Boland: Inside History\, a book celebrating her long and distinguished career\, was recently published by Arlen House\, its editor will join in conversation with Boland. In January 2017 Boland was appointed editor of Poetry Ireland Review.\nPoetry has been an integral part of Eavan Boland’s life since she was a young girl. In college she wrote her first publication\, 23 Poems. She has gone on to publish nearly 20 books of poetry\, winning awards and accolades from readers and critics alike. Boland\, a self-described “woman poet\,” has always had trouble reconciling those two words. “It was like there was a magnetic opposition between the two concepts\,” she said. “The woman coming from the collective sense of nurture in Ireland\, and the poet coming from the much more individualist\, creative realm.” Mary Robinson quoted Eavan Boland’s poetry during her inaugural speech as President of Ireland in Dublin Castle on 3 December 1990\, and on 15 March 2016 President Obama quoted lines from her poem “On a Thirtieth Anniversary” (from Against Love Poetry) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. \nBoland’s is a fascinating career which develops from her early attachment to Yeats\, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing\, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath\, Elizabeth Bishop\, and Adrienne Rich\, and her lucid\, critical engagement through poetry and prose with Ireland’s poetic tradition. \nThis event was formerly advertised as the ILS Annual Dinner\, the dinner part of the evening has now been cancelled. \nGuest of Honour: Eavan Boland\n \nBoland\, the youngest of five children\, was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat\, her mother\, Frances Kelly\, an artist. The family moved to London when Boland was six and she went to school there until 1956. Her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951 recalls her sense of otherness at this early age: \n…the teacher in the London convent who\,\nwhen I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom\nturned and said — “You’re not in Ireland now.” \nDuring her father’s next posting\, from 1956 until 1960\, the family lived in New York. Boland returned to Dublin and to boarding school at the Convent of the Holy Child in Killiney when she was fifteen. At Trinity College she studied Latin and English and graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1966. She lectured in Trinity 1967-1968 and then resigned to devote her time to writing. She wrote poems as a child and had published poems in the Irish Times while still an undergraduate. She published her first collection\, New Territory\, in 1967\, when she was twenty-two. During the 1970s she gave writing workshops throughout Ireland and in 1980 she co-founded Arlen House\, an Irish feminist press. \nFor Boland\, what she calls ‘the placelessness of her childhood’ and ‘her emphatic sense of living in a suburb in her own home’ were important influences on her work. In 1969\, in her mid-twenties\, she married the novelist Kevin Casey. They moved to a house in the Dublin suburbs in the early 1970s and have two daughters. A grandchild was born in 2014. She has written of motherhood and suburban life and according to Declan Kiberd ‘She is one of the very few Irish poets to describe with any fidelity the lives now lived by half a million people in the suburbs of Dublin.’ \nSince 1996\, Boland spends the academic year at Stanford College\, Palo Alto\, California\, where she is a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme\, but she calls Dundrum home. Speaking in 1988\, Boland said of herself: ‘I see myself as an Irish poet\, I think it’s important that Irish poets have a discourse with the idea of Irishness\, and I think it’s probably very important that an Irish woman poet doesn’t shirk that discourse because there have been gaps\, vacancies or silences in literature’. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/annual-dinner-eavan-boland-26-june-2017/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:America,art,biography,book signing,exile,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/eavan-boland3-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170424T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170424T210000 DTSTAMP:20171123T230245Z CREATED:20170109T164338Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230245Z UID:8864-1493062200-1493067600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Carlo Gébler - 24 April DESCRIPTION:Author\, playwright\, teacher and filmmaker Dr. Carlo Gébler visits the ILS to read from his work and reflect on his career\, changes in attitudes to literature in his lifetime and his recent short story collection and memoirs. His most recent publications are The Projectionist\, the story of Ernest Gébler\, a life of his father that mixes memoir and biography\, the short story collection\, The Wing Orderly’s Tales\, and Confessions of a Catastrophist (2015). \nFor almost 25 years\, Gebler worked as a teacher and writer-in-residence in the Maze and Maghaberry Prisons. In his 2016 book of short stories based on that experience\, The Wing Orderly’s Tales\, he gives a fascinating insight into the inmates he worked with and why some people end up committing crimes. Previous work considering imprisonment and its consequences includes A Good Day For A Dog (2008) and My father’s Watch (2009) – the latter written with Patrick Maguire is an intensely moving memoir of his co-author\, one of the ‘Maguire Seven’\, wrongly imprisoned as a teenager for making bombs for the IRA. Gébler has already proved himself a master at transmuting historical facts into compelling fiction…And in this new novel he’s just as adroit at creating psychological and dramatic suspense out of known facts … a book so rich in characterisation\, so expertly paced and so well written that it works equally well as absorbing social history and page-turning thriller.Irish Independent \nAs a catastrophist who never doubted from the moment he started that conditions in what he calls the Kingdom of Letters would only get worse\, Carlo Gébler is not in the least surprised by how things have turned out. It was always going to go downhill and in his Confessions of a Catastrophist (2015) he described that process but in his own personal\, idiosyncratic and caustic way. The book is an intriguing mixture of pungent\, fierce and striking memoir with pithy mordant notes on the literary trade\, on the books he’s written and why he wrote them\, and on the difficult business of negotiating a way through the thickets and trying to make a living. Also published in 2015 was his part biography/part memoir about his relationship with his father Ernest Gébler: The Projectionist: The Story of Ernest Gébler. He tells the enthralling story of his father’s life\, covering his strange and alienated childhood\, his disastrous family relationships\, his marriage to writer Edna O’Brien\, his staunch socialism and uncompromising disciplinary attitude\, and his final heartbreaking struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. \nSpeaker:\n\nCarlo Gébler was born Dublin in 1954\, the eldest son of writer parents\, Ernest Gébler and Edna O’Brien. He was educated at Bedales School\, the University of York\, where he studied English\, and the National Film & Television School. He has a PhD from Queen’s University\, Belfast. He started his career in television and made a number of documentary films for Channel 4 and others. Gébler is also the author of novels\, short stories and radio dramas. As well as his film-making and literary work\, Gébler has also worked as a teacher and academic. In the early nineties he was the creative writing tutor at the Maze prison and since 1997 he has been the writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. Gébler has taught at Queen’s University Belfast and has contributed to the creative writing programme at the Oscar Wilde Centre\, Trinity College Dublin\, for many years and currently teaches the ‘Writing for a Living’ course there. He was elected a member of the Aosdána in 1990. He is a past chairman of the Irish Writers’ Centre. He is married with five children and currently resides outside Enniskillen\, Co Fermanagh\, Northern Ireland.\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/carlo-gebler-24-april/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,interview,novel,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Carlo.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20150518T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20150518T203000 DTSTAMP:20171123T234536Z CREATED:20161006T192912Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234536Z UID:8368-1431977400-1431981000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Ó Conaire in London - 18 May DESCRIPTION:The ILS / ITS Noel O’Connell Annual Memorial Lecture will be given by Dr Pádraigín Riggs on the subject of ‘The role of London in the life and work of Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882-1928)’. This lecture is organised in conjunction with the Irish Texts Society. \nPádraig Ó Conaire was born in Galway city in 1882 and died in Dublin in 1928. From 1900 to 1915 he lived in London\, where he was employed as a civil servant at the Board of Education. During this period he was a teacher of Irish in classes organised by the Gaelic League and London County Council and took part in plays staged by the League. One of the most distinguished and prolific of the writers of the early Irish-language Revival\, he published over 400 short stories\, over 200 essays\, one novel and a small number of plays. His novel Deoraíocht (1910) was largely set in London and it has been described by James M. Cahalan (The Irish Novel: A Critical History) as “the most innovative\, forward looking Irish novel in either language…before the arrival of Joyce as a novelist…”\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society:\n\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nDr Pádraigín Riggs\nDr Pádraigín Riggs was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Irish\, UCC\, until her recent retirement. She has published studies of the Irish-language writers Donncha Ó Céileachair and Pádraic Ó Conaire\, and she is currently engaged in writing a biography of Eleanor Hull\, who was a President of the Irish Literary Society and one of the founders of the Irish Texts Society\, and its first Honorary Secretary. As well as her prolific academic writing on modern Irish-language literature she is also an established literary critic in that area. She is a member of the Council of the Irish Texts Society and is secretary of the committee that organises the annual Irish Texts Society/UCC Irish Departments Seminar and has edited three volumes of that Seminar’s Proceedings in the ITS Subsidiary Series. She has a deep interest in the history of the Irish in London. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/o-conaire-in-london-18-may/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,Collaboration,history,Irish language,lecture ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/its_2015.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20141127T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20141127T203000 DTSTAMP:20171123T234825Z CREATED:20150523T202352Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234825Z UID:7000-1417116600-1417120200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Dermot Healy and Sense of Place - 27 Nov DESCRIPTION:The annual joint lecture of the Irish Literary Society and the Centre for Irish Studies\, St Mary’s Twickenham. This year’s lecture is to be delivered by Dr. Keith Hopper\, Research Fellow\, Centre for Irish Studies\, St Mary’s University\, Twickenham.\n\n“The Passionate Transitory”: Dermot Healy and the Sense of Place. \nUntil his untimely death in June 2014\, Dermot Healy was frequently regarded as ‘Ireland’s greatest living writer’. In a documentary devoted to Healy’s work in 2011\, the late Seamus Heaney hailed him as the poetic heir to Patrick Kavanagh: ‘Kavanagh was the poet of\, as he said\, “the passionate transitory”\, bits and pieces of the everyday snatched out of time. He was the poet of praise for those things. It isn’t just nature poetry\, it’s gratitude for the whole gift of existence in Healy’. Outside of Ireland\, Healy is probably better known as a novelist\, but he was also a playwright\, screenwriter\, actor\, editor\, and all-round literary enabler. This talk will present an overview of Dermot Healy’s work\, focussing on the importance of time\, memory and place in his eclectic oeuvre. \nPresented in association with the Centre for Irish Studies\, St Mary’s University\, Twickenham:\n\n\n \nSpeaker:\n\nDr Keith Hopper\nDr Keith Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education\, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University\, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (revised edition 2009)\, general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–2007)\, and co-editor of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement\, and is currently completing a book on the writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan. Forthcoming publications include co-editing a series of four books by and about the late Dermot Healy (Dalkey Archive Press\, 2015). URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ils-cis-lecture-the-passionate-transitory-dermot-healy-and-the-sense-of-place/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,lecture,research ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/05/healy-slider.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR