• Ó Conaire in London – 18 May

    The Bloomsbury Hotel The Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

    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. Pádraig Ó Conaire was born in Galway city in 1882 and died in Dublin in ...

  • Carlo Gébler – 24 April

    The Bloomsbury Hotel The Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

    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 ...

  • Eavan Boland – 26 June 2017

    The Bloomsbury Hotel The Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

    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 ...

  • William Trevor – 21 Sept

    The Embassy of Ireland 17 Grosvenor Pl, London , London

    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. The Ambassador of Ireland Mr. Adrian O’Neill, the Trevor family and Viking Books host an evening to celebrate the life ...

  • On the Pavement Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park – 19 Nov

    The Embassy of Ireland 17 Grosvenor Pl, London , London

    Lecture by Cahal Dallat with guests Ciarán Hinds and Anne-Marie Fyfe & launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project   Nobel-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 ...

  • The Country Girls, a celebration – 18 April

    Irish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith, United Kingdom

    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... So begins Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls. With the support of the Dublin: ...

    £8
  • 6 May – Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and London

    The Bloomsbury Hotel The Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

    Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and London: Charles Henry Wilson and Irish Literature The 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 ...

    £8
  • Essaying the Body: Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine – 5 June

    The Bloomsbury Hotel The Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

    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 ...

    £8
  • Michael Wood, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen – 20 Nov

    The Embassy of Ireland 17 Grosvenor Pl, London , London

    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 ...

  • Polly Devlin, Writing Home – 25 Nov

    The Bloomsbury Hotel The Bloomsbury Hotel, 16-22 Great Russell Street, London, United Kingdom

    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 ...

    £8