BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Irish Literary Society - ECPv6.16.3//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH 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 BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20260329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20261025T010000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:UTC BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:UTC DTSTART:20170101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251125T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251125T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20251104T000950Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251125T161031Z UID:21086-1764099000-1764104400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Arlen House 50th - 25 November DESCRIPTION:We are sorry to report that we will not be joined tonight by Nuala O’Connor as planned. Our apologies\, this is due to unforeseen circumstances preventing her travel. We have more than a dozen poets reading their poems and reflecting on the work of the press.\n\n\nWe’re delighted to welcome back to the Society Nuala O’Connor and Alan Hayes representing Arlen House as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this pioneering press with a group of writers drawn from the latest in the Washing Windows series of poetry collections: Washing Windows V: Women Revolutionise Irish Poetry\, 1975–2025\, the largest anthology of Irish women poets ever published. The night will also feature the London launch of O’Connor’s latest collection\, Menagerie. Washing Windows V is the final volume in the series honouring the groundbreaking work of publishers Catherine Rose and Eavan Boland\, Arlen House’s pioneering editors in the 1970s and 1980s. \n\n\n\nThe first Arlen House book came out in September 1975\, the same month that Virago in London published their first book. The first Virago book was a gentle oral history of women in the Lake District while the first Arlen House was a radical exposé of women’s lives in 20th century Ireland and the controlling power of the Church.Alan Hayes\n\n\n\nCatherine Rose founded Arlen House\, Ireland’s first feminist press\, in Galway during the 1975 International Women’s Year. The press’s early work focused on championing women’s writing in Ireland\, the first publication was Rose’s The Female Experience: The Story of the Woman Movement in Ireland\, the work of Margaret Mac Curtain\, Janet Martin\, and Terry Prone featured and the Press revived the work of neglected writers such as such as Kate O’Brien and Norah Hoult. Since 1999 the extraordinarily prolific editor and publisher Alan Hayes has run the press.\n\n\n\n\n\n \nThe event will be followed by a booksale and signing. Tickets available below or you can purchase membership from the shop page which covers all tickets for the 2025-6 season. \n\n\n Speakers: Nuala O'Connor\n\n\n\n Nuala O’Connor\nNuala O’Connor was born in Dublin\, Ireland\, in 1970. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin\, she is a novelist and short story writer and lives in County Galway with her husband and three children. Nuala has won many prizes for her short fiction including the Short Story Prize in the UK and Ireland’s Francis MacManus Award. She is editor at flash e-zine Splonk. Nora was her fifth novel\, she is also the author of several short story and poetry collections\, Menagerie being the latest.. \n\nAlan Hayes\n Alan Hayes\nAlan Hayes is publisher and editor of Arlen House\, Ireland’s oldest feminist press\, specialising in equality and diversity. \n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/arlen-house-50th-25-november/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,feminism,history,interview,Irish language,publishing,Reading,special event,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/arlen-at-50.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20250522T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20250522T203000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20250429T211357Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250429T214350Z UID:21030-1747942200-1747945800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Foreign Tongues - 22 May DESCRIPTION:The Annual Noel O’Connell Memorial Lecture\, a joint venture of the Irish Literary Society and Irish Texts Society will be delivered by Phyllis Gaffney on her recent book Foreign Tongues\nVictorian Language Learning and the Shaping of Modern Ireland which is the first historical overview of the study of languages in Ireland. \n \nHow history shifts languages and languages in turn shape history is a deep-rooted\, dynamic process manifest in Victorian Ireland. In Foreign Tongues\, Gaffney sheds new light on this period of Irish history\, exploring how continental influences that predated the Penal Laws were reinvigorated in the wake of the French Revolution. An influx of foreign teachers and religious orders created institutions for an emerging élite\, and University education expanded. At the same time\, civil service reforms opened careers across the British Empire to graduates from all religions. The result is that Ireland’s Victorian colleges embraced language study—ancient and modern\, Irish and European—more eagerly than their British counterparts. \n[Prof. Gaffney] dissects for instance the travails\nof the Irish language since independence and partition. Its pride of place as a\nrepository of idealism and its status as the country’s first official language\ncoexist with problems on the ground such as well-documented difficulties in\nteaching it and\, one might add\, disaffection on the part of many of the young\npeople studying it. .Grace Neville\nUniversity College Cork\,\n\n \nAn adaptive\, fast-changing academic landscape laid the groundwork for today’s Ireland—culturally confident\, open to Europe and the world—while the dramatic rise of the Gaelic League forged a bond between language\, education\, and politics with pervasive effects on Irish identities in the twentieth century. Gaffney will outline some profiles of individual professors to reveal pioneering scholarship\, precarious careers\, sudden scandals\, and denunciations and dismissals linked to local conflicts and foreign wars. Her book documents how the advance of women’s education cleared the path for a cohort of notable female professors across modern languages. \n\n \n  \n Speaker: Professor Phyllis Gaffney\n\n\n\n Phyllis Gaffney\nPhyllis Gaffney is a researcher who has taught at Carysfort College of Education and University College Dublin. She is the author of several books\, most recently The Medieval Imagination: Mirabile Dictu. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/foreign-tongues-22-may/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,lecture,Nationalism,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/04/foreign-tongues-banner.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20241125T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20241125T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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:20260530T184818 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:20231027T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20231027T190000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20231008T154152Z LAST-MODIFIED:20231008T163202Z UID:20012-1698433200-1698433200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Poetry as Commemoration showcase DESCRIPTION:Last year we engaged with Poetry Ireland and the Poetry as Commemoration project in UCD to develop workshops which used poetry as a means to deepen our collective understanding of Ireland’s past and to explore a challenging period of history relating to the War of Independence and Civil War. The three workshops were delivered by Roisin Tierney and Ian Duhig who developed the work of poet members of the Society\, this event provides a stage for those poets to deliver their work. \nWe hope we’ll have a good showing from members to support our poets in the beautiful setting of the Fitzrovia Chapel. This is a free event open to all. c70 mins running time\, a drinks reception will follow. \nThe workshops to develop our poets’ work were sponsored by: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/poetry-as-commemoration-showcase/ LOCATION:Fitzrovia Chapel\, Fitzroy Place\, 2 Pearson Square\, London W1T 3BF\, London\, Fitzrovia Chapel\, Fitzroy Place\, 2 PeW1T 3BF\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,history,London-Irish,Nationalism,poetry,politics,Reading,social history,violence ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/POETRY-COMM-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20231023T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20231023T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20231008T095914Z LAST-MODIFIED:20231008T172632Z UID:19990-1698089400-1698094800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:ILS/ITS Joint Lecture - 23 Oct DESCRIPTION:The Annual Noel O’Connell Memorial Lecture\, a joint venture of the Irish Literary Society and Irish Texts Society will be delivered by Dr. Mary MacDiarmada on ‘Art O’Brien and Irish Nationalism in London\, 1900-25’. \n\nLondon-born and reared\, Art O’Brien’s journey from wealthy electrical engineer to leader of Irish militant nationalism in London was\, by any measure\, quite extraordinary. In her talk and in the book on which it is based MacDiarmada uses the life of O’Brien (1872–1949) as a central axis on which to construct an analysis of Irish nationalism in London from 1900 to 1925. \nShedding light on the work of the ‘presiding genius’ of the Irish movement in London [this] publication of Art O’Brien and Irish Nationalism in London 1900-25 by Dr Mary MacDiarmada is a long overdue biography of one of the most fascinating characters of the Irish revolution …Ronan McGreevy (Irish Times\, October 2020)\nO’Brien was a member of the Gaelic League\, Sinn Féin\, the Irish Volunteers\, the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the Irish Self-Determination League of Great Britain. He also established a prisoner relief organization and had significant involvement in gun-running for the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. Appointed London envoy of Dáil Éireann in 1919\, he was a close confidant of Michael Collins\, Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera and was a mediator in various peace initiatives between the British and Sinn Féin during 1920 and 1921. Yet\, despite his extensive contribution to the Irish revolution\, little is known of O’Brien’s activities. \n\nBased on rigorous research in British and Irish archives\, MacDiarmada recounts the vital contribution O’Brien made to the prosecution of the Irish revolution. The talk will also recount the hitherto little-known story of Irish cultural\, political and militant nationalism in London between 1900 and 1925. \n\nImage credit: Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney (left) and Art O’Brien (right) congratulating JJ O’Kelly (centre) on his re-election as President of the Gaelic League at the Mansion House in Dublin in August 1920. Photo: National Library of Ireland\, NPA POLF 170 \n\n \n  \n Speaker: Dr Mary MacDiarmada\n\n\n\n Dr Mary MacDiarmada\nDr Mary MacDiarmada is a Research Fellow in the School of History and Geography\, Dublin City University (DCU). URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ils-its-joint-lecture-23-oct/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:emigration,history,Irish language,lecture,London-Irish,Nationalism,research ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/art-obrien.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230925T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230925T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20230905T161850Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230907T231545Z UID:19758-1695670200-1695675600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:A Thread of Violence - 25 Sept DESCRIPTION:Mark O’Connell’s latest book\, A Thread of Violence\, concerns the murders committed by Malcolm Macarthur in 1982 of a nurse\, Bridie Gargan\, and a farmer\, Dónal Dunne. It is both an utterly compelling account of one of Ireland’s most notorious crimes and an interrogation of the nature of true crime writing itself. When Macarthur\, the heir to a small fortune\, found himself suddenly without money\, he decided to rob a bank. To do this\, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them\, he killed two people\, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest nearly brought down the Irish government. When Mark O’Connell set out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes\, he tracked down Macarthur himself\, living out his days in Dublin. O’Connell will be in conversation with Brian Dillon. In A Thread of Violence Mark O’Connell has investigated\, with immense skill and insight\, the mind of a double murderer\, and in the process has shown the essential mysteriousness of such a mind-perhaps of any mind. The result is a beautifully wrought narrative that is at once frightening and thrilling. A masterly workJohn Banville\n\nThis event will be followed by a signing and a book sale. \n \n  \n Speakers: Mark O'Connell\n\n\n\n Mark O’Connell\nMark O’Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. He previously visited the ILS to discuss his first book\, To Be a Machine\, which won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019\, he became the first ever non-fiction writer to win the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book\, Notes From an Apocalypse was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He is a contributor to the New York Review of Books\, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker. \n\nBrian Dillon\n\n\n\n Brian Dillon Name\nProf Dillon studied English and Philosophy at University College Dublin\, and completed a Ph.D. (on concepts of time in twentieth-century criticism and theory) at the University of Kent in 1999. Before joining Queen Mary in 2019\, he was head of the Writing programme at the Royal College of Art. His first book\, a memoir titled In the Dark Room\, was published in 2005. His creative and critical writing has appeared in publications such as the Guardian\, The London Review of Books\, Artforum\, The New York Times\, The New Yorker\, Granta and The White Review. Dillon has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries\, and is an editor at Cabinet\, an arts and culture magazine based in New York. \n\n\n\n\nTickets at our Shop page. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/a-thread-of-violence-25-sept/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:crime,history,interview,research,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/thread-of-violence.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230327T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230327T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20221205T175715Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230316T092321Z UID:19577-1679945400-1679950800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Jess Kidd and Mike Dash on the Batavia - 27 March DESCRIPTION:We’re delighted to welcome back Jess Kidd to the Society to discuss her novel\, The Night Ship. The novel is based on the extraordinary story of the Batavia\, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company that in 1628 was wrecked on Morning Reef\, on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off western coast of Australia. Its wrecking was followed by factions in the crew instigating a massacre of most of the survivors. This was amongst the first contacts of europeans with the continent of Australia and provides a brutal alternative to the myth of Cook’s arrival bringing Enlightenment values.\n\nJess will be joined by the historian Mike Dash whose fascinating account of the Batavia story\, Batavia’s Graveyard (2002) opens up a wider history of the Dutch Republic\, seventeenth century trade and exploration. In both Dash’s history and Kidd’s novel the later discovery of the Batavia and its archeological recovery feature. Kidd establishes a connection over the span of centuries via the lives of two young characters: in 1628 a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and\, in the 1980s\, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island. Dash’s book was the invaluable starting point to Kidd’s research which led her from Haarlem and Amsterdam to Australia. The wreck was discovered in 1963\, over the next two decades\, archaeological excavations of the ship and various campsites evidenced the extent of the savage campaign. Find out more about Kidd’s research trip on her site: jesskidd.com \n\nLyrical\, haunting\, a beautiful and elegant fictional interpretation of history\, I loved it.Kate Mosse on Kidd's The Night Ship\nScholarly and exhilarating. Not only history\, but an enthralling sea yarn and true-crime thriller.Associated Press on Dash's Batavia's Graveyard\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis event will be followed by a signing and a book sale. \n\n Speakers: Jess Kidd\n\n\n\n Jess Kidd\nJess Kidd is the author of three novels and is the winner of the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. Jess’ debut novel\, Himself\, was published by Canongate in October 2016. The Hoarder\, her second novel\, hit the shelves in February 2018. Jess’s third book the marvellous Victorian\, supernatural thriller\, Things in Jars came out in 2019 featuring the intrepid detective Bridie Devine. She is also currently developing her own original TV projects with leading UK and international TV producers\, her children’s book Everyday Magic was published in 2020. Find out more on her website: jesskidd.com \n\nMike Dash\n\n\n\n Mike Dash\nDash read history at Cambridge and went on to complete a PhD back in 1990. Since then he has enjoyed an eclectic career as a journalist\, magazine publisher and author\, in the course of which he has written five heavily-researched and acclaimed books: Tulipomania\, Batavia’s Graveyard\, Thug\, Satan’s Circus and The First Family. He has also run the Smithsonian Museum’s history blog. Find out more on his website: mikedash.com URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/jess-kidd-and-mike-dash-on-the-batavia-27-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Australia,book signing,history,interview,Mutiny,naval history,novel,politics,religion,research,social history,violence ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Batavia-night-ship-date-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20220909T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20220909T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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:20220627T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220627T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20220510T134754Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220621T183242Z UID:19066-1656358200-1656363600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Multiple Joyce - 27 June 2022 DESCRIPTION:In this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses we are delighted to welcome David Collard back to the Society with his new book\, Multiple Joyce: One Hundred Short Essays About James Joyce’s Cultural Legacy (Sagging Meniscus Press\, June 2022). Springing from the essays we’ll have discussion\, song\, readings and music to mark the UK launch of the book and to bring our season to a close. \n The story goes that a man in  Zürich once asked James Joyce if he could kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses. Joyce declined\, saying that it had done many other things as well. Multiple Joyce is a book inspired by those other things – it fizzes and astonishes at every turn\, springing Joyce’s masterpiece free from the idolatry of academe and reminding us how strange and hip it must have seemed in 1922. John Mitchinson\, co-host of Backlisted Podcast\nHolding up a funhouse mirror to our times\, Collard finds a multitude of Joyces\, in often ludicrous disguises\, wherever he looks—whether at Anthony Burgess\, Cher\, first editions\, Flann O’Brien\, Guinness\, Hattie Jacques\, John Cage\, Kim Kardashian\, Lego\, Moby-Dick\, numismatics\, perfume\, pianos\, Princess Grace\, puns\, The Ramones\, Sally Rooney\, Stanley Unwin\, Star Wars\, waxworks or Zylo spectacles. Endlessly reinvented and exploited\, Joyce emerges as a ubiquitous\, indispensable and ruthlessly commodified Everyman. An excerpt riffing on Timon of Athens\, Walter Benjamin and Ironman can be read on the RTÉ site. As Rónán Hession puts it in his foreword\, Collard is above all “good company” and “I wish that the first time anyone heard about Joyce was from David Collard.” We’re delighted that Hession\, author of Leonard and Hungry Paul and Panenka will be joining Collard in discussion. \n Collard’s Joyce nerdiness excels! Eimear McBride\nThe event will be followed by a sale of Multiple Joyce and a signing by the author. There will also be a grand giveaway of Joyce titles. \n Speakers and performers: \n  \n David Collard\n\n\n\n David Collard\nDavid Collard is a London-based writer\, reviewer\, researcher\, editor and occasional broadcaster\, appearing regularly in the Times Literary Supplement\, Literary Review and elsewhere\, in print and online. Previous titles include About a Girl\, a reader’s guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (C B Editions\, 2016).Find out more on David’s website. \n\nRónán Hession\n\n\n\n Rónán Hession\nRónán Hession is a writer and musician based in Dublin. His debut novel\, Leonard and Hungry Paul\, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2019. The book was shortlisted for numerous awards and chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 50 great Irish novels of the 21st century. Ronán’s second novel. \n\n Melanie Pappenheim\n\n\n\n Melanie Pappenheim\nMelanie Pappenheim is a singer\, performer and composer. Her versatility has allowed her to explore several different genres. She has worked with with many leading contemporary composers including Jocelyn Pook\, Orlando Gough\, Gavin Bryars and Graham Fitkin and performed in a huge variety of venues ranging from The Royal Opera House\, the ENO\, The Royal Albert Hall\, the National Theatre\, Glyndebourne\, a barge on the Thames\, a tent in Sussex\, a tower in Wells\, in clubs\, in lighthouses\, hillsides\, halls and basements everywhere. Find out more on Melanie’s website. \n Sarah Angliss\n\n\n\n Sarah Angliss\nSarah Angliss’ music explores the sonorities of voices and ancient instruments\, revealing and augmenting them with her distinctive electronic techniques. In 2021 she received a Visionary Award from the Ivors Academy for her body of work. Sarah draws on her lifelong interest in European folksong\, cybernetics and esoteric sound culture. These inspire her progressive and strikingly original music for film\, theatre and the live music stage.Find out more on Sarah’s website \n Frank Grimes\n\n\n\n Frank Grimes\nFrank Grimes was born in Dublin and trained at the Abbey Theatre School of Acting. He was a member of the Abbey Players for seven years and performed in O’Casey\, Synge\, Yeats\, Lady Gregory\, Joyce and O’Connor. He scored an early success as the young Brendan Behan in Borstal Boy. rank has worked extensively in the theatre in London; at the National Theatre\, Royal Shakespeare Company\, the Royal Court and in London’s West End\, as well as in Dublin and New York. Amongst his many Joyce related credits he performed in Anthony Burgess’s Joyce musical Blooms of Dublin and has previously performed his hit one-man show on James Joyce\, “…the he and the she of it…” in Dublin\, London and Paris.Find out more on Frank’s website \n\nStephanie Ellyne\n\n\n\n Stephanie Ellyne\nStephanie Ellyne is an American actress based in London and Dublin. She recorded the 45-hour audio book of Booker nominee Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks\, Newburyport (Whole Story/W.F. Howes) in 2020\, and plays Amy Jennings in on-going British/American audio drama Dark Shadows with Big Finish\, nominated for the BBC Audio Drama Awards. Other work includes The Confessions of Dorian Gray (Big Finish; Open Book (BBC Radio 4); and The Man Behind The Prophet (BBC World Service). Stephanie records stories for the annual Costa Short Story Award\, and is a frequent narrator for RNIB Talking Books. Her most recent audio book is Things Are Against Us by Lucy Ellmann (W.F. Howes).   \n\n\n\n  \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/multiple-joyce/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,emigration,exile,history,Joyce,music,Reading,research,Ulysses ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/Multiple-Joyce-slider8.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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:20211115T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20211015T053505Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211028T094614Z UID:18465-1637004600-1637010000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Reflections from the Border - 15 November DESCRIPTION:  \n\nAs tension persists over the future of the Protocol and frustration is leading to renewed speculation of the possibility of a United Ireland we engage with four writers whose work is gathered in a landmark new anthology reflecting on the border. The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island\, 2021) is a landmark anthology of fiction\, non-fiction and poetry. Amid renewed international focus on the border in Ireland the anthology contributors Darran Anderson\, Jill Crawford\, Michael Hughes\, Séamus O’Reilly and editor James Conor Patterson join us to read from their work and discuss the meaning of partition in the 21st century for those people that inhabit the divide. \n\n\nThe idea for the book has been on my mind for some time now\, probably since the Brexit vote when it became apparent that there would be consequences for freedom of movement across the Irish border. I quickly found that for all the news reports\, vox pops and column inches being filled\, very often the voices which were left out of the conversation were the ones most affected by it\, and I wanted to redress that balance by giving border writers the opportunity to speak their truths. Working with New Island on this book has been an absolute dream\, and given that they are behind some of the most important anthologies of Irish writing to date\, I can’t wait to share this latest project with the world. — James Conor Patterson\, Anthology Editor. \n\n\nThe New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021) \n  \n\n  \n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n\nSpeaker: Darran Anderson\n\n\n \nDarran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (2015)\, chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ by the Financial Times\, the Guardian\, the A.V. Club and others\, and described by the Guardian as ‘a dizzying and brilliant piece of creative non-fiction’. He has co-edited The Honest Ulsterman\, 3:AM Magazine\, Dogmatika and White Noise. He writes for the likes of the Atlantic\, frieze magazine\, and Magnum\, and has given talks at the V&A\, the LSE\, the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Venice Biennale. \n  \nSpeaker: Jill Crawford\n\n\n \nJill is a rural Northern Irish writer\, based in London. Fiction at Stinging Fly\, n+1\, Winter Papers\, Stranger’s Guide\, and Faber’s ‘Being Various’: New Irish Short Stories. \n  \n \nSpeaker: Michael Hughes\n\n\n \nMichael Hughes grew up in Keady\, Co. Armagh\, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh and read English at Corpus Christi College\, Oxford before training in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He has worked for many years as an actor under the professional name Michael Colgan\, and he also teaches creative writing. His first novel\, The Countenance Divine\, was published by John Murray in 2016. He previously spoke at the ILS on his widely praised second novel Country (Hodder & Stoughton\, 2018). \n  \n  \n \nSpeaker: Séamas O’Reilly\n\n\n \nSéamas O’Reilly is a columnist for the Observer and writes about media and politics for the Irish Times\, New Statesman\, Guts and VICE. He shot to a kind-of prominence with a range of online endeavours including ‘Remembering Ireland’\, a parody of Irish nostalgia sites\, which featured entirely invented moments from Irish history. In 2016\, he posted a long Twitter thread about the effects Brexit would have on Northern Ireland\, which led to his first political writing for the New Statesman. Later on that year\, his exasperated reviews of the novels of erstwhile footballer and manager Steve Bruce led to his participation in events with Guardian Football Weekly and various others. Séamas lives in Hackney with his family. \n  \n\nSpeaker: James Conor Patterson\n\n\n \nJames is the editor of the anthology in discussion The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021). 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. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/reflections-from-the-border-15-november/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,documentary,history,interview,politics,publishing,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/new-frontier-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20211015T034805Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T090439Z UID:18449-1636399800-1636405200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Irish-London - 8 November DESCRIPTION:Professor Richard Kirkland joins in conversation with Roy Foster\, the Society’s Vice President\, on Kirkland’s new book Irish London: A Cultural History 1850–1916 (London: Bloomsbury\, 2021). In the years following the Irish Famine (1845–52)\, London became one of the cities of Ireland. The number of Irish in London swelled to over 100\,000 and from this mass migration emerged a distinctive and vibrant culture based on a shared sense of history\, identity and experience. In this book\, Richard Kirkland brings together elements in Irish London’s culture and history that had previously only been understood separately or indeed largely overlooked (as in the case of women’s’ contributions to London Irish politics and culture). In particular\, Kirkland makes resonant cultural connections between Irish and cockney performers in the music halls\, Irish trade fairs\, temperance marches\, the Fenian dynamite war of the 1880s\, St Patrick’s Day events\, and the later cultural agitation of revivalists such as W.B. Yeats and Katharine Tynan. \n  \n\nSpeaker: Professor Richard Kirkland\n\n\n \nRichard Kirkland is Professor of Irish Literature & Cultural Theory at King’s College London. Professor Kirkland’s research is focused on the literature\, culture\, and politics of Ireland in the modern period of contemporary Northern Ireland\, during the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century\, and in the context of the Irish in London. He has written four monographs and co-edited two collections of essays grouped around these areas. \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 Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914 came out in 2014 and his most recent work On Seamus Heaney (Princeton\, 2020) came out last year and is the subject of an ILS film with Roy and Catherine Heaney.\n  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/irish-london-8-november/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:emigration,history,interview,London-Irish,politics,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IRISH-LONDON-SS.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20201208T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20201208T200000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20201202T115341Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T135835Z UID:18047-1607454000-1607457600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:7th Annual Yeats Lecture - 8 December 2020 DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is delighted to announce that the speaker for this year’s Annual Yeats Lecture will be Garry Hynes\, Director of Druid. Following an introduction by the President of the Irish Literary Society\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, Hynes will give a short presentation and then join in conversation on the recent DruidGregory season with the novelist and Druid board member\, Colm Tóibín. \n\nThroughout September and October Druid defied the pandemic to mount a return to live theatre in the magic fields\, woods and gardens of Coole Park in a tribute to\, and an animation of\, the life and works of Galway’s Augusta Lady Gregory. Launched in the historic setting of her Coole Park home\, DruidGregory included five of Lady Gregory’s one-act plays\, performed by a company of 12 actors and musicians\, and directed by Garry Hynes. \n\nSpeaker: Garry Hynes\n\n\n \nGarry Hynes co-founded Druid in 1975 and has worked as its Artistic Director from 1975 to 1991 and from 1995 to date. From 1991 to 1994 she was Artistic Director of the Abbey Theatre\, Dublin. Garry has also worked with the Gate Theatre (Ireland); the Royal Shakespeare Company and the Royal Court (UK)\, Center Theatre Group\, Second Stage\, Signature Theater\, Manhattan Theater Club\, the Kennedy Center\, the Mark Taper Forum and the Spoleto Festival (USA). Follow Garry on twitter: @DruidTheatre \n  \n\n \nSpeaker: Colm Tóibín\n\n\n \nColm Tóibín’s novels include ‘Brooklyn’ (2009) and ‘Nora Webster’ (2015) and two collections of stories. He has been three times shortlisted for the Booker Prize for ‘The Blackwater Lightship’ (1999)\, ‘The Master’ (2005). His play ‘The Testament of Mary’ (2012)\, was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Play in 2013. His ninth novel ‘House of Names’ appeared in 2017. His other work includes collections of short stories\, poetry\, many works of non-fiction and editorial works. His writing has been translated into more than thirty languages. He is a member of the board of Druid. \n  \n\n\nSpeaker: Bernard O’Donoghue\n\n\n \nBernard O’Donoghue is a Professor and Emeritus Fellow in English at Wadham College\, Oxford. He is a poet and literary critic\, and author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995) – he succeeded Heaney as President of the ILS. His most recent poetry collection is The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016). Previous volumes include Farmer’s Cross (2011)\, Gunpowder (1995)\, Here Nor There (1999); Outliving (2003); his Selected Poems came out in 2008. O’Donoghue was winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award and Cholmondeley Award in 2009.  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/7th-annual-yeats-lecture-8-december-2020/ CATEGORIES:Collaboration,feminism,history,theatre,tradition,women LOCATION:https://www.crowdcast.io/e/72rr9q1k/register END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T203000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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=Europe/London:20200427T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20200126T204729Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200404T103549Z UID:16823-1588015800-1588021200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Moth\, 10th Anniversary - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. \nJoin the Society to celebrate the 10th birthday of The Moth\, one of Ireland’s foremost art and literature magazines. Founded in 2010 by Rebecca O’Connor and Will Govan\, The Moth features poetry\, short fiction and art by established and up-and-coming writers and artists. Each issue also hosts two interviews – with writers such as Sally Rooney\, Sharon Olds\, Colm Toibin and Paul Muldoon. They also publish The Caterpillar and run several art and literary prizes\, including one of the biggest prizes in the world for a single poem. \n  \nWill and Rebecca will regale you with stories about The Moth\, which they run from their home in rural Ireland\, and will be joined by a stellar line-up of past contributors including the novelist Thomas Maloney\, former Moth Poetry Prizewinners Ann Gray and Abigail Parry\, the winner of The Moth Short Story Prize 2019 Conor Crummey\, and newcomers Mark Lawlor and Bryony Littlefair (who recently won a Moth Retreat Bursary). \n\n ‘Exquisitely designed and choc-a-bloc with exciting new artworks and wordworks.’Paul Durcan‘If you want to keep your finger on the pulse\, The Moth magazine is all you need.’Christine Dwyer Hickey \n  \nCopies of The Moth will be available for sale at the event. \n  \nSpeaker: Conor Crummey\n\n\n \nConor Crummey’s story ‘Journeys’ was chosen by author Kit de Waal as the winner of the €3\,000 Moth Short Story Prize 2019. Crummey\, from Belfast\, now lives in London\, where he is a lecturer in public law at Queen Mary University of London. Follow Conor on twitter: @ConorCrummey \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Will Govan\n \n\n\n \nWill Govan is co-founder and director of The Moth. He studied portraiture at The Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and paints at The Moth Studios in Cavan Town in Ireland. He had his first solo exhibition\, Shark With Plunger & Other Paintings\, at the Johnston Central Library in Cavan in July 2019 Follow Will on twitter: @WillGovan1 \n  \nSpeaker: Ann Gray\n \n\n\n \nThe author of a number of collections including Painting Skin (Fatchance Press\, 1995) and The Man I Was Promised (Headland\, 2004)\, Ann was commended for the National Poetry Competition 2010 and won the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2014. \n  \nSpeaker: Bryony Littlefair\n\n\n \nBryony Littlefair is a poet and workshop facilitator living in South London. Her pamphlet Giraffe won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize in 2017 and is out now with Seren Books. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and in 2019 received the Moth Retreat Bursary Award. Follow Bryony on twitter: @B_Littlefair \n  \n \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Thomas Maloney\n\n\n \nThomas Maloney was born in Kent in 1979\, grew up in London\, and studied Physics at Oxford. His first novel\, The Sacred Combe\, was published in 2016. He lives in Oxfordshire with his family. \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Rebecca O’Connor\n\n\n \nRebecca is co-founder and director of The Moth. She edits and designs The Moth and The Caterpillar. Her debut poetry collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Strong Shine Award and she is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize from Poetry Review. Her debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other was published by Canongate in 2018. Follow Rebecca on twitter: @RebeccaMoth \n  \nSpeaker: Abigail Parry\n\nAbigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work\, including the Ballymaloe Prize\, the Troubadour Prize\, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection\, Jinx\, published by Bloodaxe in 2018\, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. Follow Abigail on twitter: @ginpitnancy \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-moth-10th-anniversary-27-april/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,art,Collaboration,history,interview,poetry,Reading,short story,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/moth-slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20200122T200034Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200224T163528Z UID:16589-1582572600-1582578000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Ciaran Carson celebration - 24 Feb DESCRIPTION:Irish was his cradle language\, and his writing in English always had the verve and zest of a learned language. This was particularly true of his translations – of Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche and the Táin\, or Dante’s Inferno. As well as from Irish and Italian\, he translated short poems from French and Spanish with great style and lucidity.Bernard O'Donoghue\, President of the Irish Literary Society \nThe Irish Literary Society is delighted to partner with The Seamus Heaney Centre\, Queens University Belfast to produce a celebration of the life and work of Ciaran Carson\, the great Belfast poet and former Director of the Centre. Carson was due to deliver last year’s joint Irish Literary Society / Irish Texts Society annual lecture but his cancer diagnosis prevented his coming and we were saddened to hear news of his death in October 2019. \nThe event will be presented by the current Director of the Centre\, Glenn Patterson\, and will feature music\, song\, readings and reflections from Liam Carson\, Cahal Dallat\, Martina Evans\, Leontia Flynn\, Professor Michael Parker\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, James Conor Patterson\, Anton Thompson-McCormick.\n \nCiaran Carson was the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre\, a dear friend and colleague to all there\, and an inspiration as a poet\, writer\, and as a citizen: a great European literary figure who lived his entire life in Belfast… ‘il professore\, il maestro\,’ in the words of Stephen Sexton\, ‘to whom language itself is indebted.’Glenn Patterson\, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre\nCarson was a member of Aosdana and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was one of the so-called “Belfast Group” of poets in the 1960s which included Seamus Heaney\, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. During his career Carson published 16 volumes of poetry and also wrote a number of novels and books about traditional Irish music. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 with responsibility for traditional music and\, more latterly\, literature. In October 2003 he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University\, Belfast.\n \nPresented in association with the The Seamus Heaney Centre: \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ciaran-carson-celebration-24-feb/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,music,poetry,politics,Reading,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ciaran-carson-celebration1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191120T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191120T200000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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:20191028T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191028T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20190913T151626Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220909T174253Z UID:12299-1572291000-1572296400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Belfast Agreement and Brexit - 28 Oct DESCRIPTION:As we approach yet another Brexit deadline (31 October) the Society has banded-together with the Irish Pages journal to reflect on the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and to consider possible futures for the union\, Anglo-Irish relations\, power sharing and the border. The current special issue of Irish Pages is given over to reflections on the agreement. The essays and poetry therein record not just relief that peace was achieved in Northern Ireland but anger at the compromises of the agreement and frustration at the lack of representation throughout the two years since the breakdown of power sharing: the devolved executive and assembly which have powers over the region collapsed in January 2017. The region currently holds the world record for the longest period without a sitting government\, which it passed after 589 days. \nThe UK’s future in the EU remains uncertain\, the referendum result and ongoing political turmoil leaves the country in a febrile atmosphere. Before some definitive point is reached we are inviting a range of voices (political\, poetic\, academic) to consider the probity of past choices\, the problems caused by the current vacuum and what comes next. The event will be followed by a sale and signing of the Irish Pages journal. \n   \nIn diametric opposition to The Agreement\, like (dog-) whistling in the dark\, the Brexit vote preceded (incredibly now) its assumed unknown text. It has taken most of three years to come up with even the first stage of this massive modern codex – with many more scrolls and codicils to come\, if in fact Brexit does materialize.Chris Agee\, editor of Irish Pages\n  \nSince the Good Friday Agreement had concluded without any discussion on what constituted the seeds of the conflict\, it was unsurprising that the legacy of the past turned up as a troubling spectre over its future.Monica McWilliams\, Making and implementing the Agreement in Irish Pages \nSpeaker: Chris Agee\n\n\n \nA poet\, essayist and photographer\, Chris Agee is the Editor of Irish Pages. His third collection of poems\, Next to Nothing (Salt\, 2008)\, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. He recently edited Balkan Essays (The Irish Pages Press\, 2016)\, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays. His fourth collection of poems\, Blue Sandbar Moon (The Irish Pages Press) appeared in 2018. He lives in Belfast\, and divides his time between Ireland\, Scotland and Croatia. \n  \nSpeaker: Jean Bleakney\n\n\n \nJean Bleakney was born in Newry where her father was a Border Customs Officer. She studied Biochemistry at Queen’s University Belfast and has worked in medical research and horticulture. Her first three collections were published by Lagan Press. Here Selected Poems were issued by Templar Poetry in 2016 to coincide with the appearance of her work on the GCE Advanced Level syllabus in Northern Ireland. Her most recent collection is No Remedy (2017)\, also published by Templar Poetry \n  \nSpeaker: Moya Cannon\n\n\n \nMoya Cannon was born in Dunfanaghy\, Co Donegal and now lives in Dublin. She holds degrees in History and Politics and in International Relations from\, respectively\, University College\, Dublin and . Corpus Christi College\, Cambridge. She is the author of five collections of poetry\, most recently Keats Lives (Carcanet\, 2015). A sixth collection from Carcanet Press is forthcoming in 2019. She is a member of Aosdána. \n  \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  \nSpeaker: Professor Ronan McCrea\n\n\n \nA native of Dublin\, Ronan McCrea is Professor of Constitutional and European Law at University College London. He is also a member of the Bar of Ireland and the Bar of England and Wales. He was previously a ‘référendaire’ (judicial clerk) at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and was for ten years a visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest. In addition to his academic work he practices law at 11 King’s Bench Walk Chambers in London and comments frequently on legal matters and EU affairs for RTÉ\, BBC\, Sky News and in publications such as The Irish Times\, The Irish Independent and The Financial Times. \n  \nSpeaker: Sir Richard Needham\n\n\n \nSir Richard Needham\, 6th Earl of Kilmorey\, Kt PC was a Member of Parliament from 1979 to 1997\, he served as Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992 and as Minister of State for Trade between 1992 and 1995. He served under Thatcher and later John Major as a Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992 and under Major as Minister of State for Trade between 1992 and 1995\, and was instrumental in transforming Northern Ireland’s economic base and the UK’s export strategy under Michael Heseltine. He was the longest serving British government Northern Ireland minister. Needham’s book Honourable Member and Battling for Peace: Northern Ireland’s Longest-Serving British Minister (1999); is an account of his years in Northern Ireland and his contribution to peace. Needham holds an honorary degree of Doctor of laws from the University of Ulster. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1994 and knighted in 1997. \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-agreement-and-brexit/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading,research,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/belfast-and-BREXIT_bw.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190605T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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:20260530T184818 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:20190429T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190429T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 CREATED:20190111T123643Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190319T122821Z UID:11239-1556566200-1556571600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:29 April - Ciaran Carson DESCRIPTION:UNFORTUNATELY THIS EVENT IS NOW CANCELLED. NOTICE OF A REPLACEMENT EVENT WILL BE SENT OUT TO SUBSCRIBERS ASAP. TICKET REFUNDS WILL BE ISSUED. \n\nThe poet Ciaran Carson visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. Carson’s title for this talk ‘From There to Here: Some Reflections on Translation’ references his retrospective collection ‘From There to Here’ which opens “slender-beaked\, my pen jets forth/a stream of beetle-coloured ink”. That ink has flowed prodigiously over the years since his first publication\, The New Estate (1976). While firmly rooted in Belfast life Carson’s work has embraced an unusually wide range of forms\, style and subject matter. His translations from the Irish include versions of the Táin (2007) and Merriman’s The Midnight Court (2006)\, and this collection contains more previously unpublished translations from the Irish. Translation has informed his own poetry\, in particular\, the his translation of the Old Irish epic\, The Tain (Penguin Classics\, 2007)\, suggested a new linguistic territory to him and led to three collections of poems in quick succession: For All We Know (2008)\, On the Night Watch (2009)\, and Until Before After (2010). From his dazzling\, astonishingly inventive translations to his own poems and prose\, Ciaran Carson continues to demonstrate what it means to have ears that truly work. He is one of the best poets on either side of the Atlantic and the publication of every one of his books is a major event in our literatures.Charles Simic\nCarson’s translations have looked abroad too and include works from Ovid\, Rimbaud\, Mallarmé\, and a revelatory version of Dante’s Inferno. Carson’s work is both political and personal as it engages recent history—including the Troubles and violence in Northern Ireland—and the past. In The Irish for No\, Carson’s long lines encompass listings of both urban realities and nostalgic images of the past\, linking memory and cartography to give a portrait of life in Belfast. The more recent On the Night Watch and Until Before After offer more personal lyrics. Carson’s interest in traditional Irish music informs Last Night’s Fun: About Music\, Food and Time (1997)\, a book of prose\, and the history of Belfast plays in his memoir\, The Star Factory (1998). Carson is also author of the novel Shamrock Tea (2001). \n\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n\n\n\n\nA signing of From There to Here will be held after the talk. \n\nSpeaker: Ciaran CarsonBorn in Belfast\, Northern Ireland\, into an Irish-speaking family\, poet Ciarán Carson attended Queen’s University\, Belfast. He held the position of traditional arts officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 and was appointed director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in 2003. Carson is the author of a number of collections of poetry\, including The Irish for No (1987)\, winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1989); First Language: Poems (1994)\, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; Breaking News (2003)\, winner of the Forward Poetry Prize; For All We Know (2008); On the Night Watch (2010); and Until Before After (2010). Wake Forest University Press has published his work for American readers\, including The Midnight Court (2006)\, a translation of the 18th-century Irish poet Brian Merriman’s work\, and Carson’s own Collected Poems (2009). \n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/29-april-ciaran-carson/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:folklore,history,Irish language,lecture,politics,Reading,social history,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ciaran-carson-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184818 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:20190225T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190225T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 CREATED:20181231T142618Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190219T071945Z UID:11162-1551123000-1551128400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:25 Feb - The North\, Irish poetry special DESCRIPTION:The ILS is working with The North poetry journal for this event to launch their special Irish issue. Editors and poets Jane Clarke and Nessa O’Mahony lead a rich evening of readings and discussion of contemporary Irish poetry. From an issue bursting with ideas and innovation (120 poems by 107 poets) we are gathering some fascinating poets to illustrate the variety and quality of contemporary Irish writing: Siobhán Campbell\, Derek Coyle\, Nora Hughes\, Judy O’Kane (fresh from winning the Charles Causley International Poetry Prize) and Mary Noonan join our hosts. Apart from readings on the night we will be considering recent trends in form and subject\, ideas of Irishness\, poetry and the 20 years of fragile peace in Northern Ireland and\, inevitably\, Brexit. \nThe event is also our farewell to the poet Matthew Sweeney who died last August. Sweeney was a much loved figure on the London literary scene for many years. Ever prolific\, Sweeney published two new collections in his last year\, My Life As a Painter (Bloodaxe) and King of a Rainy Country (Arc) inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose. More work has appeared posthumously in the latest edition of Southword and three poems of Sweeney’s feature in this issue of The North\, we will include a reading.  \nThe widespread dismay amongst Irish writers in response to the gender imbalance of both poets and critics represented in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017)\, has led to a flowering of interest in the many overlooked Irish women poets from the seventeenth century to the present day. At this opportune moment we have asked Siobhán Campbell\, to contribute a reflection on the largely forgotten Irish poet Lola Ridge (1873-1941). \nA signing will follow the event.  \n\nChair: Jane Clarke\n\n\n \nJane Clarke grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure in Co. Wicklow. Her first collection\, The River (Bloodaxe Books\, 2015). She was awarded a literary bursary by the Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaíon in September 2017 for the completion of her second collection and her work on a sequence in response to a soldier’s letters from the Front during World War 1\, in collaboration with the Mary Evans Picture Library\, London. She now combines writing with her work as an independent consultant providing facilitation\, team building and leadership development to public service and not-for-profit organisations. \n\nChair: Nessa O’Mahony\n\n\n\nNessa O’Mahony is a Dublin-born poet and novelist. She has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk (1999)\, Trapping a Ghost (2005)\, In Sight of Home (2009) and Her Father’s Daughter (2014). She isand co-editor with Siobhán Campbell of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her first novel\, The Branchman (Arlen House\, 2018) was recently published. O’Mahony won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards.. \n\n\n\n  \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Siobhán Campbell\n\n\n\nSiobhán is a poet\, critic and lecturer. She is the author of six works of poetry and co-editor with Nessa O’Mahony of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her poetry has received awards in the National Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Competition and is the recipient of an Arts Council award and the Templar Poetry Prize. Much of Campbell’s work is expressive of her interest in the place of the political poem in contemporary poetics – her most recent volume Heat Signature (March\, 2017) reflects on commemoration and the centenary of the Dublin Rising while her Cross Talk (2010) explored boundaries and the interwoven nature of family\, local and historical conflicts. \n\n\n\n\n. \n \n\nSpeaker: Derek Coyle\n\n\nDerek Coyle has published poems in Irish Pages\, The Texas Literary Review\, The Honest Ulsterman\, Orbis\, Cuadrivio\, Skylight 47\, Assaracus\, and The Stony Thursday Book. He has been shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award (2010\, 2014\, 2015)\, and in 2012 he was a chosen poet for the Poetry Ireland ‘Introductions Series.’ In 2013 he was runner up in the Bradshaw Prize. He is a founding member of the Carlow Writers’ Co-Operative. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s.. \n \n\nSpeaker: Nora Hughes\n\n\nNora grew up in Belfast. She has lived in London since 1972 and worked in education for many years\, specialising in adult literacy. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies\, including Envoi\, Second Light\, The Interpreter’s House and The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press\, 2014). She is working towards a pamphlet collection. \n\n \n. \n\nSpeaker: Mary Noonan\n\n\n\nMary Noonan was born in London\, but grew up in Cork. Her debut collection of poems was The Fado House (Dublin\, Dedalus Press\, 2012). In 2007\, she was selected to take part in the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in Dublin and was invited to read at the Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin in 2009. The manuscript of The Fado House was awarded the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in June 2010. She works as a lecturer in French literature at University College Cork. \n \n\n \n\n \n\nSpeaker: Judy O’Kane\n\n\n\nJudy is a prose writer and poet. She worked the wine harvest in St Estèphe\, Bordeaux on sabbatical from legal partnership in Dublin and her work explores terroir\, wine’s sense of place. She has just been announced as the winner of the 2018 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. In 2017 she won the National Memory Day Prize and the Irish Post Prize\, and was prize winner at Wells Festival of Literature and Guernsey Literary Festival. In 2015 she won the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. Her poetry is published in The World of Fine Wine\, Landfall\, and The North: The Irish Issue. Thirst\, her non-fiction work-in-progress\, was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Award for best un-commissioned first biography. An extract\, The Drawing Room\, was published by the Manchester Review in December 2017. Judy holds an LL.B from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Life Writing from UEA\, where she is completing a PhD in Creative and Critical writing. She teaches advocacy at the Law Society of Dublin.\nTwitter @judeokane \n. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/25-feb-the-north-irish-poetry-special/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Collaboration,feminism,folklore,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/the-north-slider-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181119T060000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181119T200000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 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:20181029T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181029T210000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 CREATED:20180911T070122Z LAST-MODIFIED:20181112T135217Z UID:10758-1540841400-1540846800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Troubling the Classics - 29 Oct DESCRIPTION:For our October event we’re bringing together a poet\, a novelist and a dramatist to reflect on their work and its place in a rich seam of Irish literature inspired by the Greeks. The continuing interest of Irish writers in Greek and Latin classical literature as a model and source for inspiration is somewhat surprising given the almost complete disappearance of the teaching of classical languages in Irish schools over the last 50 years. Yet the myths and stories of the ancient world still fascinate audiences and our writers continue to deliver fresh interpretations which reflect on Irish society.  \n‘The violence lies in Carr’s language\, shocking and extraordinarily vivid: we almost hear the buzzing of carrion flies\, smell the stench of carnage.’The Times\nThe nationalist attempt to recover the native\, suppressed\, literary tradition of Ireland found a model in 5th century BCE Athenians and their reaching back to the foundational epics of Homer. From the 19th century Irish translations of Greek tragedy were tied up in a project of recovery of a bardic tradition; from Yeats to Heaney this poetic tradition continued and absorbed great figures of modern poetry like MacNeice\, Boland\, Mahon and Kennelly. More recently that tradition has broadened and our dramatists and novelists have found intriguing correspondences in form and culture with the Greeks e.g. Alan McMonagle’s novel Ithaca\, Theo Dorgan’s collections Orpheus and Greek\, Peter Fallon’s versions of Hesiod and of the Georgics of Virgil\, and Frank McGuinness’ startling new versions of Greek drama. Our three guests representing the dramatic\, poetic and prose novel forms will discuss their work and the appeal and relevance of ancient literature. ‘Part of the thrill is recognising the correspondences between the characters and Homer’s originals . . . the language is enough to keep you enthralled . . . Hughes’s achievement is to prove that Homer remains ignoble\, messy and horribly familiar — Guardian’The Guardian Marina Carr’s plays bring alive the Greek classics in a uniquely contemporary and Irish manner. In By the Bog of Cats she reconstructs Medea\, in her Hecuba she positions the Queen at the centre of a drama clearly intended as a corrective to Euripides\, who portrays Hecuba as an enraged avenger. Michael Hughes’s widely praised second novel Country transposes the Illiad to border country\, Northern Ireland\, post-ceasefire\, 1996. After a woman turns informer\, an IRA gang takes matters into its own hands and storms the local British army base. But there is a falling out between Pig\, the gang’s leader\, and the sniper\, Achill. Death and betrayal follow. The poet Peter McDonald’s has lately developed an interest in verse translation from Greek and in 2016 produced The Homeric Hymns (2016)\, a series of verse translations into different English forms\, along with detailed notes on the ancient Greek poems themselves. Speakers: Marina CarrOne of Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights whose poetic tragedies often reinterpret ancient myth and address violence and the place of women in Irish life. Across her great Midlands-set plays Carr creates a timeless version of Ireland\, replete with ghosts\, ill-fated women and tragic families. Throughout her work Carr’s engagement with myth and folktale can be read as a richly imaginative reflection on the development of Irish cultural identity. In 2017 Carr was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a lecturer in Dublin City University’s School of English. She is working on new plays for the Abbey and the Kiln Theatre in London\, the latter about Clytemnestra in the aftermath of the Trojan war will appear in 2019-2020 season. Dr Florence Impens (Chair)Dr Impens holds a PhD in English from Trinity College\, Dublin\, as well as MAs in French and in Irish Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. Her book Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960: The Answering Voice provides the first overview of classical presences in Anglophone Irish poetry after 1960. Focusing on classical presences in the work of Seamus Heaney\, Michael Longley\, Derek Mahon\, and Eavan Boland. She is the author notably of ‘Classics and Irish Poetry after 1960’ in the forthcoming 5th volume of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Kenneth Haynes Ed.)\, and of ‘Classical Roots’ in Seamus Heaney in Context (Geraldine Higgins Ed.)\, due out with Cambridge University Press. Michael HughesMichael Hughes grew up in Keady\, Co. Armagh\, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh and read English at Corpus Christi College\, Oxford before training in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He has worked for many years as an actor under the professional name Michael Colgan\, and he also teaches creative writing. His first novel\, The Countenance Divine\, was published by John Murray in 2016. His widely praised novel Country is published by Hodder & Stoughton and available now. Professor Peter McDonaldProfessor Peter McDonald (born 1962 in Belfast) is a poet\, Professor of English and Related Literature\, he holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church\, Oxford and is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He produced the modern edition of the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (2007). The focus of his research now is the editing of W.B. Yeats’s Complete Poems for the Longman Annotated Poets series. He has published six original volumes of poetry since 1989\, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016)\, and his Collected Poems were published in 2012. A signing of Michael Hughes’ Country and Peter McDonald’s The Homeric Hymns will follow the event. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/troubling-the-classics/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Classics,Greek,history,Latin,novel,poetry,Reading,research,theatre,tradition,translation ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/troubling-classics_slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181016T110000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181016T123000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 CREATED:20181003T165420Z LAST-MODIFIED:20181004T071700Z UID:10959-1539687600-1539693000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Archive of the Irish in Britain visit - 16 Oct DESCRIPTION:We are delighted to announce a special members-only visit to the Archive of the Irish in Britain. The Archive consists of collections of documents\, audio and video recordings\, books\, photographs and ephemera cataloguing the history of the Irish in Britain from the late nineteenth century to the present day.  \nDr Tony Murray\, the curator of the archive\, will give an introductory talk and lead two groups through unique materials in the archive before leading a question and answer session.  There are two sessions available to paid-up ILS members with a capacity of 10 members for each session\, so we’ll have to operate on a first-come\, first-served basis for this visit. If you would like to book for the visit please e-mail the Honorary Secretary stating your time-slot preference: irishlitsoc@gmail.com. We expect this event will be over-subscribed so we’re sorry if we cannot accommodate everybody on this occasion. \nSLOT 1: 11am-12.30pm \nSLOT 2: 2pm-3.30pm   \nThe archive has been a crucial resource for the development of The Irish Studies Centre\, see the video above for more details on the history of the archive and the centre.  \n  \nTransport: \nNearest underground (Tube): Aldgate East (Circle and Hammersmith & City) and Aldgate (Metropolitan) \nNearest Bus(es): 415\, 25\, 67\, 115\, 205\, 254Parking Details: Parking is very restricted. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/archive-of-the-irish-in-britain-visit-16-oct/ LOCATION:Archive of the Irish in Britain\, 16 Goulston Street\, London\, E1 7TP\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:archive,Collaboration,documentary,exile,history,Members only-event,research,social history END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180521T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180521T203000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 CREATED:20171212T194151Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180829T131846Z UID:9914-1526931000-1526934600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Border Walk: Garrett Carr and Iain Sinclair - 21 May DESCRIPTION:First this three-hundred-mile line demarcated counties\, then countries and will next be the frontier of the European Union. As the uncertain agreements and ‘statements of intent’ are confirmed and disavowed by the UK and EU representatives over the Irish border we look at the topography of this line on the map and consider the human geography of borderlands. Cartographer\, artist and writer Garrett Carr has in his book The Rule of the Land told the story of Ireland’s border and a created a portrait of its landscape and people. Carr will join in conversation with the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair whose work is rooted in London and lately within the influences of psychogeography.“Garrett Carr engages a mapmaker’s eye and a writer’s sensibility to create a great book” The Irish Times.\n\nWe pass here into another allegiance\,\nexpect new postage stamps\, new prices\, manifestoes\,\nand brace ourselves for the change. But the landscape does not alter;\nwe had already entered these mountains an hour ago.\nFrom The Frontier\, by John Hewitt 1962\n\nBoth writers have explored borderlands and those neglected blanks on the map that hide so much of our past\, the disconnect between mapped boundaries and shared experience. Sinclair’s fascinating and haunting book London Orbital recounts the year he spent walking around the M25 – the motorway that encircles London. Carr’s The Rule of the Land explores a fragile borderland\, with an uncertain future. By foot or canoe he followed the border closely. At night he camped out on the land. He visited architecture on the border\, forts and dykes as well as defensive buildings of the Troubles. His engagements those living on the frontier\, bring us the lived experience of the line on the map.\n‘Here in this brilliant\, crackling series of final walks through the London landscape\, he finds the dissolving identity of the city increasingly disconcerting.’ Review of The Last London in The Observer.\n\n\nSpeaker: Garrett Carr\n\nGarrett Carr was born in Donegal in 1975. He has previously published three Young Adult novels. A lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University\, he lives in Belfast with his family. His research interests include writing about place\, history and memoir. He is also a map-maker and publishs academically on the topic of cartography. He holds an MA in Art History\, an MPhil in Geography and a PhD in Creative Writing. In his exhibition Mapping Alternative Ulster he brought together diverse mapmakers: local historians\, activists\, artists\, geographers and urban planners for a show of maps. See his website here: http://www.garrettcarr.net/\n\n\nSpeaker: Iain Sinclair\n\nIain Sinclair is the award-winning writer of numerous critically acclaimed books on London\, including Lights Out for the Territory\, London Orbital and London Overground. The son of a Welsh GP\, Sinclair studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published\, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past. He won the Encore Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Downriver. Sinclair has been documenting the peculiar magic of the river-city that absorbs and obsesses him for most of his adult life. He lives in Hackney\, East London. In his most recent book\, The Last London (2017)\, he strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. See his website here: http://www.iainsinclair.org.uk/\n\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/border-walk-garrett-carr-and-iain-sinclair-21-may/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,cycling,history,interview,nature,Reading,social history,walking ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/border-walking.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180430T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180430T203000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 CREATED:20180116T231722Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180422T224539Z UID:10083-1525116600-1525120200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Micheál Ó Conghaile - 30 April DESCRIPTION:The ILS is delighted to announce that the ILS / ITS Noel O’Connell Annual Memorial Lecture will be given by Micheál Ó Conghaile on his Irish language translations of the London-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh and the Irish language literary scene today. Ag aistriú Martin Mc Donagh ansin dfheadainn labhairt faoi scribhneoireacht agus foilsitheoireacht na Gaeilge inniu agus ceisteanna a fhreagairt. Ó Conghaile’s translations of McDonagh’s work – The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Banríon Álainn an Líonáin)\, The Cripple of Inishmaan (Cripil Inis Meáin)\, and The Lonesome West (Ualach an Uaignis) – have received acclaimed productions by the Galway International Arts Festival. \nPlease note that the venue for this event is the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith. For the ILS April and May events while our usual home the Bloomsbury Hotel is being refurbished we will be at the ICC Hammersmith. \nÓ Conghaile was born and is based in Connemara\, Galway\, he is a member of Aosdána and established the publishing house\, Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 1985. This event is organised in conjunction with the Irish Texts Society. You can read his short story The Colours of a Man here. The talk will be delivered in English with readings in Irish and English by the actor Aonghus Weber. \nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society:\n\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nMicheál Ó Conghaile\nMicheál Ó Conghaile was born in Inis Treabhair\, Galway\, in 1962. He established the publishing company Cló Iar-Chonnachta (CIC) in 1985 and has since published over 300 books and 200 traditional Irish music albums and spoken word albums to date. \nHis short stories are collected as Mac an tSagairt (Gallimh\, Cló Iar-Chonnachta\,1986); An Fear a Phléasc (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 1997)\, An Fear nach nDéanann Gáire (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2003); and The Colours of Man (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2012). His novels include Sna Fir (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 1999)\, which was shortlisted for The Irish Times Literature Awards 2001; and the novella Seachrán Jeaic Sheáin Johnny (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2002). His poetry is collected as Comhrá Cailí (1987). His plays include Cúigear Chonamara (Gallimh\, An Taibhdhearc\, 2003)\, translated by Una Ní Chonchuir as The Connemara Five (Galway\, Arlen House\, 2007); and Jude\, one of the winners of Gradam Cuimhneacháin Bháitéir Uí Mhaicín\, and published as Jude (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2007). He has translated Martin McDonagh’s plays The Beauty Queen of Leenane as Banríon Álainn an Líonáin; and The Lonesome West as Ualach an Uaignis (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2002). He translated the Irish-language film Kings (directed by Tom Collins. 2007)\, based on the English-language play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road\, by Jimmy Murphy. His works have been translated into various languages\, including Romanian\, Croatian\, Albanian\, German and English. A member of Aosdána\, he lives in Indreabhán\, County Galway. \n\nAonghus Weber\nAonghus was born and has lived most of his life in Ireland. He moved to London after training at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In Ireland Aonghus worked extensively in TV and film: a founding cast member of TG4’s long running soap opera Ros na Rún and a cast member of RTE’s television drama series Glenroe. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/micheal-o-conghaile-30-april/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,lecture,Reading,theatre,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Micheál-Ó-Conghaile-4.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180326T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180326T203000 DTSTAMP:20260530T184819 CREATED:20171207T225547Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180118T000617Z UID:9879-1522092600-1522096200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Dervla Murphy - 26 March DESCRIPTION:Dervla Murphy is Ireland’s most prolific travel writer who for five decades has travelled the world mostly alone\, and mostly by bicycle. A fiercely independent woman who turned her back on societal conventions at a time when few were as brave\, she observed and recorded the world with wonder and curiosity\, and an astute political sensibility. Few have ever explored the world on two wheels as has Dervla Murphy\, she joins us to reflect on her literary work and the great journeys she has undertaken. \n‘An extraordinary book\, reflecting an extraordinary woman and one of the great travellers of our time.’William Trevor\, on Wheels Within Wheels in The Times \nMurphy’s extraordinary autobiography\, Wheels Within Wheels\, documents her travelling life since 1963\, tracing the her route from Ireland to India by bike\, via Afghanistan. Her last journey was to Palestine and is recounted in Between River and Sea: Encounters in Israel and Palestine. Before that there have been some 20 other books\, about journeys that have taken her all over the world\, from Peru to Pakistan\, from Africa\, India and Siberia to Cuba\, Romania and Laos. \nIn all her journeys\, she has biked\, walked or simply improvised her way through countries when bikes broke down or were stolen\, or her own limbs proved temporarily untrustworthy. Only weeks into her first journey in 1963\, she shot a wolf that threatened attack in rural Yugoslavia by using a gun she had acquired and learnt to use in Ireland\, with the support of helpful\, if astounded\, Lismore gardaí. Nothing thereafter\, including increasing age\, ever appears to have daunted her. Murphy will join Dorothy Allen in conversation. \n\nSpeaker: Dervla Murphy\n\nDervla Murphy was born on 28 November 1931 of parents whose families were both settled in Dublin as far back as can be traced. Her grandfather and most of his family were involved in the Irish Republican movement. Her father was appointed Waterford County Librarian in 1930 after three years internment in Wormwood Scrubs prison and seven years at the Sorbonne. Her mother was invalided by arthritis when Dervla was one year old. She was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford until she was fourteen\, when\, because of the wartime shortage of servants\, she left to keep house for her father and to nurse her mother. Dervla did this for sixteen years with occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent. Her mother’s death left her free to go farther afield and in 1963 she cycled to India. There she worked with Tibetan refugee children before returning home after a year to write her first two books. \nDervla Murphy’s first book\, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle\, was published in 1965. Over 20 other titles have followed. Dervla has won worldwide praise for her writing and has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. Now in her 80s\, she continues to travel around the world and remains passionate about politics\, conservation\, bicycling and beer. Dervla is now published by Eland. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/dervla-murphy-26-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,cycling,feminism,history,interview,social history,travel,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/dervla_murphy_slider.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR