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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191125T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191125T203000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191120T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191120T200000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
CREATED:20190915T202447Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T045046Z
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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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190605T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190506T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190506T203000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181119T060000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181119T200000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170921T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170921T200000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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:20260526T120115
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
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170424T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170424T210000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20150518T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20150518T203000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20141127T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20141127T203000
DTSTAMP:20260526T120115
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
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