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DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T193000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20220128T200452Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20220222T151730Z
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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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T193000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T193000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20211015T034805Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T090439Z
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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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20201208T190000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20201208T200000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20201202T115341Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20210312T135835Z
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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:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T193000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T193000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191120T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191120T200000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191028T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191028T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190605T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20190319T153508Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190604T084909Z
UID:11402-1559763000-1559766600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Essaying the Body: Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - 5 June
DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine join the ILS to discuss their recent books of essays. Pine’s winning last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year seemed to mark a reemergence of the essay form in Irish literature. Perhaps the flourishing of literary journals in Ireland has encouraged this\, perhaps the renewed appreciation of Hubert Butler’s work has been an influence\, certainly his cosmopolitan sensibility is present in the recent creative non-fiction of Brian Dillon\, Kevin Breathnach\, Ian Maleney… \n\nI’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question\, each dilemma\, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone\, especially young women and men\, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.Martina Evans in the Irish Times on Notes to Self\n \n\nThe personal essays of Pine and Gleeson share the ambition of those authors\, yet move inward reflecting on their own bodily traumas and the politics of the female body in Ireland in the last 50 years. In its variously raw\, funny\, acute manner Pine’s vivid collection addresses addiction\, fertility\, feminism\, sexual violence and depression. The formal experimentation of Gleeson’s Constellations is startling\, throughout this intimate account of pain is illuminating of art and the wider world. \n\n\nBooks will be for sale after and the authors will be available to sign.\n\n\n \nChair: Dr Lara Feigel\n\n\n \nDr Feigel is a literary critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King’s College London. Her most recent book Free Woman is an investigation of freedom that’s part memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. It interweaves life and literature to think about motherhood\, sex\, madness and communism\, testing the gains and costs of living freely. At King’s she co-directs the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture and runs the Ivan Juritz Prize\, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms. She reviews regularly for various publications (most frequently the Guardian and the Observer). \n  \n\n \n \nSpeaker: Sinéad Gleeson\n\n\n \nSinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays\, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta\, Winter Papers and Gorse\, and a story of hers will appear in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short story anthologies\, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland\, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is working on a novel. \n  \n\n \nSpeaker: Dr Emilie Pine\n\n\n \nEmilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies\, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave\, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance\, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press\, 2019). Her first collection of personal essays\, Notes to Self\, was published by Tramp Press (2018). \n  \n\nImage above: Femme nue auprès d’une glace\, 1889 by Paul-Albert Besnard. Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art\, New York.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/essaying-the-body-sinead-gleeson-and-emilie-pine-5-june-2/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,feminism,history,interview,lecture,medical,politics,Reading,social history,women
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190506T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190506T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20190322T134608Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20200126T130051Z
UID:11449-1557171000-1557174600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:6 May - Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and London
DESCRIPTION:Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and London: Charles Henry Wilson and Irish Literature \n\n\nThe scholar Dr Peadar Ó Muircheartaigh visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. O Muircheartaigh will speak on the work of Charles Henry Wilson\, an eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish Protestant with an interest in Irish-language literature\, who studied at Trinity College Dublin before moving to London in the 1780s to pursue the life of a writer. He would spend the rest of his life ‘struggling with adversity in London’\, but came to be a prolific journalist\, writer and translator. He would go on to edit Beauties of Edmund Burke (1798) and the papers of Henry Brooke as Brookania (1804)\, as well as writing two comedies\, Poverty and Wealth (1799) and The Irish Valet (1811). One of his most significant contributions to Irish literature was as the editor of two slim and little-known anthologies and translations of Irish-language verse (1782; 1792). Although not as sophisticated as Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry\, Wilson’s Irish anthologies have much to tell us about the nature of the interaction between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Irish literary and scribal culture in the late-eighteenth century\, in both Dublin and London. This talk will look at that interaction through the prism of Wilson’s anthologies and his collaboration with one of the most prolific and entrepreneurial Irish scribes of his time – Muiris Ó Gormáin. \nA faithful poetic translation of Pleraca na Ruarcach has since been published by Charles Wilson\, a neglected genius\, now struggling with adversity in London…Historical Memoirs of the Irish Bards\, London 1786\n\n\nCharles Henry (1757–1808) \, translator and dramatist. Born in Bailieborough\, Co. Cavan\, he studied law at TCD and became a parliamentary reporter. He edited Beauties of Edmund Burke (1798) and wrote two comedies\, Poverty and Wealth (1799) and The Irish Valet (1811). He was associated with the Brooke family\, and edited the papers of Henry Brooke (Brookiana\, 2 vols.\, 1804); he anticipated Charlotte Brooke ‘s Reliques of Irish Poetry (1789) by several years with his Poems Translated from the Irish Language into the English (1782; 1792). Although not as sophisticated as Charlotte Brooke’s Reliques of Irish Poetry\, Wilson’s Irish anthologies have much to tell us about the nature of the interaction between Anglo-Irish Protestants and Irish literary and scribal culture in the late-eighteenth century\, in both Dublin and London. This talk will look at that interaction through the prism of Wilson’s anthologies and his collaboration with one of the most prolific and entrepreneurial Irish scribes of his time – Muiris Ó Gormáin. \n\n\n\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n\n \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Dr Peadar Ó MuircheartaighPeadar Ó Muircheartaigh is Lecturer in Celtic Studies at Aberystwyth University where he teaches Gaelic languages and literature. He studied for degrees in Modern Irish and Medieval Irish at NUI Galway before undertaking postgraduate research at the University of Notre Dame and the University of Edinburgh. He has held fellowships at NUI Galway’s Moore Institute for the Humanities and at the School of Celtic Studies in the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies. In 2016 he was the recipient of the Zeuss Prize from the Societas Celtologica Europaea and in 2018 received a Charlemont Award from the Royal Irish Academy. Among his research interests are Irish literature and literary history of the long eighteenth century\, most especially Irish literary intersections with Gaelic Scotland and the relationship between print and Irish manuscript culture.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/6-may-peadar-o-muircheartaigh/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:biography,history,Irish language,lecture,research,tradition
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190429T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190429T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20190319T153727Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190412T190927Z
UID:11404-1555615800-1555621200@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:The Country Girls\, a celebration - 18 April
DESCRIPTION:I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home…\n\nSo begins Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. With the support of the Dublin: One City\, One Book festival we are bringing together a fascinating panel to discuss The Country Girls trilogy as it is being celebrated in Dublin as the chosen festival book. Quite clearly we are not in Dublin but we’re delighted to extend the consideration of O’Brien’s work to London\, a city pivotal to her writing career and the setting for the last part of the trilogy. The special edition of the trilogy produced for this celebration is published by Faber & Faber and is introduced by Eimear McBride. The trilogy changed the temperature of Irish literature in the 1960s and inspired generations of readers and writers. O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than domestic and sexual servitude\, emotional disaffection and intellectual abnegation\, was nothing short of revolutionary. Not only was O’Brien giving voice to the voiceless\, she was washing the nation’s dirty laundry in public\, laundry which has proved so dirty that\, more than 50 years later\, it is still proving in need of a rinse.Eimear McBride The passion\, artistry and courage of Edna O’Brien’s vision in these novels continue to resonate into the 21st century. In addition to readings and discussion our panel will consider the role of the city in the books\, how the romantic aspects of O’Brien’s work have coloured her reception and O’Brien’s influence on younger writers. Dublin One City One Book is a Dublin City Council initiative\, led by Dublin City Public Libraries\, \n  \n\nPresented in association with the Dublin: One City One Book:  \n  \n\n \n \nChair: Dr Anne Goudsmit\n\n\n \nDr Anne Goudsmit left Ireland to study at Sussex University and at the Sorbonne before moving to London. Her early career was in Finance\, when she worked at Citibank and subsequently at ITV. Anne wrote her PhD thesis on Northern Irish fiction at St Mary’s University\, Twickenham\, where she was a visiting lecturer. She is a member of the Irish Literary Society. She recently became a member of the board at the Irish Cultural Centre where she convenes a monthly Book Club. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Helen Cullen\n\n\n\nHelen Cullen is an Irish writer living in London. She worked at RTÉ for seven years before moving to London in 2010. Her debut novel\, The Lost Letters of William Woolf was published by Penguin in July 2018. Helen is now writing full-time and working on her second novel. She is also a contributor to the Irish Times newspaper and Sunday Times Magazine. Helen holds an M.A. Theatre Studies from UCD and is currently completing an M.A. English Literature at Brunel University. She was nominated as Best Newcomer in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Dr Sinéad Mooney\n\n\n \nDr Sinéad Mooney is a graduate of University College Cork and the University of Oxford. She is currently a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University\, Leicester\, where she teaches Irish literature and creative writing. Her monograph\, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press) won the 2012 American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize\, and her chapter on Edna O’Brien appeared in the recent in A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature\, edited by Clíona O’Gallchóir and Heather Ingman. She is currently working on a study of Irish women’s modernism.  \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Paula McGrath\n\n\n \nPaula McGrath lives in Dublin. A History of Running Away is her second novel. Her first\, Generation\, was published in 2015. She has a background in English Literature and is currently an Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland) PhD scholar at the University of Limerick. She received an Arts Council literary bursary in 2016\, and was recently Irish Writers Centre Writer-in-Residence in St Mark’s English Church\, Florence. In another life she was a yoga teacher.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-country-girls-a-celebration-18-april/
LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,history,interview,politics,Reading,religion,social history,women
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190225T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190225T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181119T060000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181119T200000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20180912T131231Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20181003T201353Z
UID:10798-1542607200-1542657600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:On the Pavement Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park - 19 Nov
DESCRIPTION:Lecture by Cahal Dallat with guests Ciarán Hinds and Anne-Marie Fyfe & launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project\n \nNobel-prizewinning poet\, WB Yeats\, though much inspired by Irish legend\, landscape and longing\, spent two-thirds of his youth in London\, the majority of that time in Chiswick’s Bedford Park\, the Utopian/aesthetic garden-suburb/artists’-colony whose diverse inhabitants fostered his literary talent and endeavours. Irish poet and literary critic\, Cahal Dallat\, has lived within a few blocks of the Yeats family’s two Bedford Park homes for all of his adult life and\, fascinated by the way Willie\, his father\, and his artistic siblings\, negotiated the metropolis’s social networks\, while dreaming of Sleuth Wood or Ben Bulben\, has lectured on the importance to Victorian London of Irish artists (poets\, painters\, playwrights\, composers\, and politicians\, for politics\, too\, is an art in Ireland) … and on the usefulness of London’s complex intersections and patronage to often-penniless\, in a genteel way\, exiled geniuses. In Bedford Park’s heady progressive atmosphere (and its winding if artificially villagey avenues) lay the seeds of Yeats’s genius\, not to mention contemporary theatre\, Modernist poetry and political and cultural changes that would invert the social and imperial order in the 20th century. With contributions and readings from Yeats’s letters and poems by actor Ciarán Hinds and poet Anne-Marie Fyfe.\n \nThe 2018 Irish Literary Society WB Yeats Lecture at the Embassy of Ireland launches the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project founded to mark Yeats’s role in Bedford Park and Bedford Park’s role in Yeats’s artistic development and life\, by placing a permanent artwork at the heart of this progressive\, 19c\, and beautifully preserved\, garden suburb. \nTo apply for an ILS members ticket contact the Hon. Secretary: irishlitsoc@gmail.com Image credit: Camille Pissarro\, Fete de Jubilee a Bedford Park\, 1897. \nSpeakers:  Cahal DallatCahal Dallat is a poet\, musician\, critic (b. Ballycastle\, Co. Antrim)\, regular BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review contributor since 1998\, reviewer for TLS and Guardian among others\, founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project\, and Charles Causley Trust Centenary musician/poet-in-residence. Former winner of Ireland’s leading poetry prize\, the Strokestown International\, his recent awards include the 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize\, and a 2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship at University of Texas in Austin (supported by CP Snow Memorial Fund). Latest collection The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff); www.cahaldallat.com \n Ciarán Hinds \nCiarán Hinds was born in Belfast: his television roles include Gaius Julius Caesar in the series Rome and Mance Rayder in Game of Thrones while film has included the lead role in John Banville’s The Sea\, and playing opposite Daniel Day Lewis in Upton Sinclair’s There Will Be Blood.  As a stage actor his recent appearances include Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive\, Hamlet with Bendict Cumberbatch at the Barbican\, McPherson’s ‘Bob Dylan musical’ The Girl from the North Country at the Old Vic\,  and the role of Hugh O’Donnell in Brian Friel’s Translations at the National.   \n Anne-Marie Fyfe \nAfter five poetry collections including House of Small Absences (Seren\, 2015)\, poet\, arts organiser\, creative-writing teacher & former Poetry Society chair\,  Anne-Marie Fyfe\, is currently embarked on a unique Arts-Council-funded 18-month teaching/writing/performing tour\, The Voyage Out\, exploring coastal regions & lives in Britain\, Ireland\, US & Canada\, leading to a new hybrid poetry/prose/travel-writing memoir (due\, Seren\, Spring 2019). Born in Cushendall\, Co. Antrim\, Anne-Marie lives in London where she has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings & classes at London’s leading live literature venue\, the Troubadour\, since 1997. www.annemariefyfe.com
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/on-the-pavement-grey-wb-yeats-in-utopian-bedford-park-19-nov/
LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR
CATEGORIES:architecture,biography,Collaboration,exile,history,poetry,social history,special event
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181029T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181029T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181016T110000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181016T123000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180521T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180521T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180430T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180430T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180326T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180326T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180219T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180219T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20171207T203821Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180208T101132Z
UID:9857-1519068600-1519074000@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Jews in Irish Literature - 19 Feb
DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is engaging with writers and academics to reflect on ‘Representations of Jews in Irish Literature’. The innovative research project of the same title was developed out of NUI Galway and Ulster University and forms the centre of tonight’s event. The main objective of the project is to analyse representations of Jews in Irish literature from the earliest times to the present. The project is investigating references to Jews in Irish literature\, whether in Irish or English\, and is collecting more substantial references into an anthology of such writing. In addition to a talk on the findings we will be welcoming a novelist\, poet and scriptwriter to read from and reflect on their work which explores Jewish-Irish connections.  \nThe academic and creative work presented explores the processes of othering by investigating the forces in consciousness and culture which generate the assumptions\, biases\, stereotypes and myths out of which the Jewish other is produced. The representation of the Jew in Irish literature actually tells us much more about Irish than about Jewish identity\, how in fact a whole psychohistory of Irishness is hidden in these neglected representations. \nPresented in association with the Representations of the Jews in Irish Literature Project:\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nDr Barry Montgomery \nBarry Montgomery is an Irish literary scholar specialising in Irish Jewish Studies and Irish Fiction. He has contributed seven chapters (from the Early Modern Period to the present in Irish fiction\, drama and poetry) to the forthcoming co-authored critical volume of the AHRC funded Ulster University and NUI Galway Representations of Jews in Irish Literature project. He forms part of the project team for the accompanying Exhibition\, which he has promoted on RTÉ radio\, Irish television\, and newspaper interviews\, delivering lectures on Irish Jewish Literary Studies at the Royal Irish Academy\, Dublin\, at The Linen Hall Library\, Belfast (to mark Holocaust Memorial Day\, 2017)\, and related conference papers at The University of Notre Dame\, Indiana\, and Georgetown University\, Washington DC. He has written on Ruth Gilligan’s Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan\, has contributed to the forthcoming Crime Fiction – A Critical Casebook (Peter Lang)\, writing on Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665)\, and contributed several entries on early nineteenth century fiction to The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel\, 1660-1820.\n  \n\nRuth Gilligan\nRuth Gilligan is an Irish novelist and journalist now living in London and working as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She has published four novels to date\, and was the youngest ever person to reach number one on the Irish bestsellers’ list. Her most recent novel\, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan (2016)\, was based around the history of the Jewish community in Ireland\, and garnered major critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as The Istanbul Review\, The Irish Pages\, Ambit and Banshee Lit. She writes regular literary reviews for the Guardian\, the TLS\, the LA Review of Books and the Irish Independent where she was a columnist for a number of years. She is also part of the global organisation Narrative 4 which uses storytelling as a tool to foster empathy between diverse communities. \n  \n\nSimon Lewis\nSimon Lewis was the winner of the Hennessy Prize for Emerging Poetry and the runner up in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2015. He also featured in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series the same year. He has been shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award\, Listowel Poetry Prize\, Strokestown International Poetry Prize and Bridport Prize and received commendations in the Gregory O’Donoghue prize and Dromineer Literary Prize. He has also been published in many literary journals and magazines including The Stony Thursday\, Boyne Berries\, Literary Orphans\, The Stinging Fly\, Bare Hands\, and Irish Literary Review. His first collection\, Jewtown\, was published in 2016 by Doire Press. \nSpread the word:
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/jews-in-irish-literature-19-feb/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:book signing,exile,folklore,history,interview,judaism,lecture,novel,poetry,politics,Reading,religion,research,social history
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/jews-irish-lit-1.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180129T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180129T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20170812T170028Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180826T111002Z
UID:9364-1517254200-1517259600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Roddy Doyle - 29 Jan
DESCRIPTION:One of Ireland’s best-loved writers makes his first appearance at the Irish Literary Society. Doyle joins us in conversation on his books\, films\, educational work and his forthcoming novel\, Smile. It tells the captivating story of Victor Forde\, for whom a chance meeting in a pub conjures up long-buried childhood memories – and it’s a book about how we all struggle to accommodate our past selves.\nThere is not a writer currently working in the English language who can match Doyle for the fluency with which he tacks back and forth between the hilarious and the heartbreaking.\nThe New York Times Book Review\nA chance meeting with an old school friend leads his protagonist on a journey back to being taught by Christian Brothers. Smile has all the features for which Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue\, the humour\, the superb evocation of childhood – but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. Just moved in to a new apartment\, alone for the first time in years\, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s pub for a pint\, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight\, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories too – of Rachel\, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity\, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame\, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school\, and of one particular Brother\, that he cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity. Doyle will be in conversation with Gavin Clarke. \nSpeaker: Roddy Doyle\n\nRoddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958 and grew up in Kilbarrack. After graduating from University College Dublin he spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer. His novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize in 1993. Several of his novels\, including The Commitments and The Snapper have been successfully adapted into films. Doyle’s work is set primarily in Ireland\, especially working-class Dublin. Inspired by David Eggers’ 826 Valencia\, he co-founded the children’s writing charity Fighting Words. Doyle has also written many novels for children\, including the Rover Adventures series. He has also written many short stories\, several of which have been published in The New Yorker. In 2016\, he translated Mozart’s Don Giovanni for the Opera Theatre Company. The stage version of The Commitments\, adapted by Doyle\, opened in London’s Palace Theatre in 2013 and toured Britain and Ireland until May 2016. \nSpread the word:
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/roddy-doyle-29-jan/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:book signing,history,interview,Reading
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171114T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171114T200000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20171023T130146Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171023T173343Z
UID:9630-1510682400-1510689600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Tara Bergin - 14 Nov
DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is delighted to invite its members to the Embassy of Ireland for an evening with one of Ireland’s most fascinating poets. As there are only limited seats available for this event interested members should apply for tickets via the form below.  \nTara Bergin’s debut collection\, This is Yarrow\, won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and she was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014.\nBergin’s Gothic imagination – precise\, claustrophobic\, yet full of vertiginous perspectives – makes her a perfect guide to these frightened\, frightening times.Paul Batchelor\, The Spectator \nShe will be reading poems from her new collection The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx\, exploring themes of intense love and grief with a dark humour. Bergin’s engagement with the world of myth and folklore was vividly present in This is Yarrow and now in her latest dark fairytale-like images fill the collection as it reflects on the life and death of Eleanor – Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. Eleanor was a member of the Socialist Democratic Federation and translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary\, before taking her own life in the same way as Emma Bovary. The event will be hosted by the Irish Ambassador Adrian O’Neill.\n\n\n  \n\n\n\nYour Name (required)\n \n\n \nYour Email (required)\n \n\n \nSubject\n \n\n \nYour Message\n \n\n \n\n Δ \n\n\n \n\nSpeaker: Tara Bergin\n\nTara Bergin was born in Dublin and moved to the UK in 2002 to undertake academic research. This culminated in a PhD on Ted Hughes’s translations of the post-war Hungarian poet János Pilinszky which she completed at Newcastle University\, where she is now a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry). She began publishing the poems that feature in her debut collection\, This is Yarrow (Carcanet\, 2013)\, in 2003. It won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the 2014 Shine/Strong Award. Bergin was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/tara-bergin/
LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR
CATEGORIES:book signing,folklore,history,interview,Members only-event,poetry,politics,Reading
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/tara_bergin.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171030T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171030T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20170903T131534Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180117T005153Z
UID:9456-1509391800-1509395400@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Writing Gay Irish Lives - 30 Oct
DESCRIPTION:In light of social and legal changes in Ireland over recent years the ILS is drawing together Irish writers to consider the representation of queer people in Irish literature. Our panel will be reflecting on London as a place of escape\, queer representation in Irish writing\, homosexuality in the discourse of what constitutes Irishness\, and the integration of queer characters and narratives into the wider culture. Here in London the 50-year anniversary since it stopped being illegal for two men (criminal law\, until Section 28\, targeted only men) to be in a relationship in England and Wales has been widely celebrated\, the law changed in Scotland and Northern Ireland later – not until 1993 was same-sex sexual activity decriminalised in Ireland. Historically many Irish queer people felt compelled to emigrate in search of a more supportive social climate\, the attraction of London was obvious as a metropolitan centre associated with tolerance of sexual diversity and established queer communities. Yet now Ireland now has gay marriage (passed by 62% vote share)\, a young\, openly gay taoiseach and progressive trans recognition legislation – the influence of Catholic dogma has clearly waned. The rich and varied work of our panel will be discussed in the context of these changes and each writer will read from their work.  \nSpeakers:\n\nDr Michael G Cronin\nMichael G Cronin is a Lecturer in English\, specialising in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish literature and in sexuality studies. He received his MA from the University of Sussex\, having studied on the renowned Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change programme. He subsequently completed a doctorate on the twentieth-century Irish Catholic bildungsroman at Maynooth University\, where he was an IRCHSS Government of Ireland scholar.  Along with Impure Thoughts\, he has published essays on twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction\, and on contemporary Irish sexual politics.  He was Guest Editor of a special issue of Irish Review (Irish Review 46\, Autumn 2013) on Irish Studies in the wake of the 2008 crash. He is currently working on a project provisionally entitled ‘Revolutionary Bodies: homoeroticism and the political imagination in Irish writing’.  \n\nMary Dorcey – UNFORTUNATELY MARY WILL NOT NOW BE ABLE TO APPEAR AT THIS EVENT\, 30 OCT\nThe critically acclaimed poet\, short story writer and novelist\, Mary Dorcey was born in County Dublin\, Ireland. She is a member by peer election of ‘Aosdana’ the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990 she won the Rooney Prize for Literature for her short story collection: ‘A Noise from the Woodshed.’ Her bestselling novel Biography of Desire (Poolbeg) was published in September of 1997 to critical acclaim and reprinted three times. She was writer in residence at Trinity College for the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies for ten years where she gives seminars in contemporary English literature and taught a creative writing course. She also taught for four years at University College Dublin. Dorcey’s most recent collection is Perhaps the Heart is Constant after All. (Salmon Poetry. October 2012) \n\nBarry McCrea\nThe Chair of our panel is Barry McCrea\, a novelist and scholar of modern European\, Latin American\, and Irish literature. He most recent book is Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (Yale University Press\, 2015)\, which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016. He is the author of The First Verse\, a novel\, winner of a number of awards including the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes and Noble “Discover” prize\, and of In the Company of Strangers: Narrative and Family in Dickens\, Conan Doyle\, Joyce and Proust (Columbia University Press\, 2011)\, which won the Yale Heyman Prize for scholarship in the humanities.Professor McCrea holds has a BA in Romance languages from Trinity College Dublin\, and a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton. Before joining Notre Dame\, he taught comparative literature at Yale University\, where he was appointed full professor in 2012. Professor McCrea teaches fall semesters in the Rome and Dublin Global Gateways and spring semesters on campus. \n\nJamie O’Neill\nJamie O’Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1962. He left for England at the age of 17 and lived and worked in England for two decades\, he now lives in Galway. His first novel\, Disturbance\, was published in 1989 and followed by Kilbrack in 1990. Thereafter O’Neill struggled to write and on parting company with both his agent and publisher he took the job as a night porter at the Cassell Hospital\, a psychiatric institution in Surrey from 1990 up to 2000. His critically-acclaimed novel\, At Swim\, Two Boys (2001) earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent claims that he was the natural successor to James Joyce\, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. At Swim\, Two Boys was re-issued this year to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. The novel describes a burgeoning love between two teenage boys\, Jim Mack and Doyler\, childhood friends – “cara macree\, pal o’ my heart” – in the early years of the 20th century in Dublin. They meet again some years later in a flute band as 15-year old Doyler teaches Jim to swim. They make a pact – on Easter Sunday 1916\, they will swim to Muglin’s Rock to claim it for themselves and for Ireland.  \n\nCherry Smyth\nCherry Smyth is a poet\, novelist and art critic. Her first poetry collection When the Lights Go Up (Lagan Press\, 2001) traces her move from Ireland to London and the negotiations of identity required in a new country. One Wanted Thing (Lagan Press\, 2006)\, her second volume\, is less concerned with loss than with a buoyant affirmation of love\, acceptance and the wider issues of the fall-out of events like 9/11 and 7/7: how these changed our world-view. In Test\, Orange (Pindrop Press\, 2012)\, she brings together a range of poetic forms from haiku to longer free-verse poems dealing with things we face in a female body. In 2000–01\, Cherry was writer-in-residence in a women’s prison and published their extraordinary work in A Strong Voice in a Small Space (Cherry Picking Press\, 2002)\, which won the Raymond Williams community-publishing prize in 2003. She has been teaching writing poetry in the Creative Writing Department of the University of Greenwich since 2004. She was appointed a Royal Literary Fellow\, 2014-2016. Her novel Hold Still (Holland Park Press\, 2013) charts the role of Irish woman Jo Hiffernan as muse to both Whistler and Courbet. \nSpread the word:
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/writing-gay-lives/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:book signing,exile,history,interview,novel,poetry,politics,Reading,social history,tradition
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170712T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170712T200000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20170630T231726Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20170701T082240Z
UID:9310-1499882400-1499889600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:History of Modern Ireland - 12 July
DESCRIPTION:The Ambassador of Ireland Mr. Daniel Mulhall and Mrs. Greta Mulhall invite members of the ILS to the launch of ‘The Cambridge History of Modern Ireland’ Edited by Eugenio F. Biagini and Mary E. Daly at the Embassy of Ireland on 12th July 2017 from 18.00 – 20.00. This event is open to ILS members only and tickets will be allocated by lottery. \nRSVP essential by 5 July: irishlitsoc@gmail.com
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/history-of-modern-ireland-12-july/
LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR
CATEGORIES:history,interview,Members only-event,special event
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/embassy-history.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170626T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20170418T182200Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T225429Z
UID:9088-1498505400-1498510800@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Eavan Boland - 26 June 2017
DESCRIPTION:Widely considered to be one of Ireland’s most important contemporary poets\, Eavan Boland is currently a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Stanford University\, where she has taught since 1996. In 2015 a New Collected Poems was published\, and Eavan Boland: Inside History\, a book celebrating her long and distinguished career\, was recently published by Arlen House\, its editor will join in conversation with Boland. In January 2017 Boland was appointed editor of Poetry Ireland Review.\nPoetry has been an integral part of Eavan Boland’s life since she was a young girl. In college she wrote her first publication\, 23 Poems. She has gone on to publish nearly 20 books of poetry\, winning awards and accolades from readers and critics alike. Boland\, a self-described “woman poet\,” has always had trouble reconciling those two words. “It was like there was a magnetic opposition between the two concepts\,” she said. “The woman coming from the collective sense of nurture in Ireland\, and the poet coming from the much more individualist\, creative realm.” Mary Robinson quoted Eavan Boland’s poetry during her inaugural speech as President of Ireland in Dublin Castle on 3 December 1990\, and on 15 March 2016 President Obama quoted lines from her poem “On a Thirtieth Anniversary” (from Against Love Poetry) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. \nBoland’s is a fascinating career which develops from her early attachment to Yeats\, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing\, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath\, Elizabeth Bishop\, and Adrienne Rich\, and her lucid\, critical engagement through poetry and prose with Ireland’s poetic tradition. \nThis event was formerly advertised as the ILS Annual Dinner\, the dinner part of the evening has now been cancelled. \nGuest of Honour: Eavan Boland\n \nBoland\, the youngest of five children\, was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat\, her mother\, Frances Kelly\, an artist. The family moved to London when Boland was six and she went to school there until 1956. Her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951 recalls her sense of otherness at this early age: \n…the teacher in the London convent who\,\nwhen I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom\nturned and said — “You’re not in Ireland now.” \nDuring her father’s next posting\, from 1956 until 1960\, the family lived in New York. Boland returned to Dublin and to boarding school at the Convent of the Holy Child in Killiney when she was fifteen. At Trinity College she studied Latin and English and graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1966. She lectured in Trinity 1967-1968 and then resigned to devote her time to writing. She wrote poems as a child and had published poems in the Irish Times while still an undergraduate. She published her first collection\, New Territory\, in 1967\, when she was twenty-two. During the 1970s she gave writing workshops throughout Ireland and in 1980 she co-founded Arlen House\, an Irish feminist press. \nFor Boland\, what she calls ‘the placelessness of her childhood’ and ‘her emphatic sense of living in a suburb in her own home’ were important influences on her work. In 1969\, in her mid-twenties\, she married the novelist Kevin Casey. They moved to a house in the Dublin suburbs in the early 1970s and have two daughters. A grandchild was born in 2014. She has written of motherhood and suburban life and according to Declan Kiberd ‘She is one of the very few Irish poets to describe with any fidelity the lives now lived by half a million people in the suburbs of Dublin.’ \nSince 1996\, Boland spends the academic year at Stanford College\, Palo Alto\, California\, where she is a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme\, but she calls Dundrum home. Speaking in 1988\, Boland said of herself: ‘I see myself as an Irish poet\, I think it’s important that Irish poets have a discourse with the idea of Irishness\, and I think it’s probably very important that an Irish woman poet doesn’t shirk that discourse because there have been gaps\, vacancies or silences in literature’.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/annual-dinner-eavan-boland-26-june-2017/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:America,art,biography,book signing,exile,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170327T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170327T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20170116T132920Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230326Z
UID:8932-1490643000-1490648400@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Mícheál Mac Craith - 27 March
DESCRIPTION:Professor Mícheál Mac Craith will deliver the 2017 joint Irish Texts Society / Irish Literary Society Noel O’Connell Lecture on the subject of ‘Robin Flower and Irish Love Poetry’. \nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society:\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nMícheál Mac Craith\nMícheál Mac Craith is a Franciscan priest who was Professor of Modern Irish at the National University of Ireland\, Galway from 1997 until his retirement in August 2011. He studied in Galway\, Rome and Louvain. His books are Lorg na hIasachta ar na Dánta Grá (1989)\, a study of the foreign influences on Gaelic courtly love poetry\, and Ón Oileán Rúin go Rún an Oileáin (1993)\, a study of the poetry of Máirtín Ó Direáin. He is interested in the Renaissance\, Counter-Reformation literature\, Jacobitism\, Ossianism and contemporary Gaelic literature\, and has published extensively in these areas. In 1997 he was awarded a Visiting Fellowship in the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. In 2003 he was Visiting Fellow at St Edmund’s College\, Cambridge\, and Associate Research Fellow at the Department of Anglo-Saxon\, Norse and Celtic at the University of Cambridge. In 2008 the Irish Research Council in the Humanities and Social Sciences awarded him a Senior Research Fellowship to investigate the period spent by the exiled earls\, O’Neill and O’Donnell\, in Rome. He is now Guardian at Collegio San Isidoro in Rome.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/micheal-mac-craith-27-march/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,lecture
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170227T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170227T210000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20170109T151132Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230615Z
UID:8846-1488223800-1488229200@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin - 27 Feb
DESCRIPTION:Renowned poet Ní Chuilleanáin is the current Ireland Professor of Poetry\, she was a founding member and editor of the literary journal Cyphers and is one of the major Irish poets of her generation. This is her first visit to the Irish Literary Society and she will be reading from her own work. Ní Chuilleanáin is the Vermeer of contemporary poetry. Her luminous interiors achieve great visual beauty\, but should not be mistaken for exercises in escapism. They are sites where history and the individual brush against each other\, force fields of action and radiant understanding.\nAingeal Clare\, The Guardian \nShe has won numerous awards and in addition to her poetic output has been an innovative and important publisher of other Irish writers and has translated poetry from Irish (most recently Máire Mhac an tSaoi)\, Italian (Maria Attanasio\, Antonella Anedda and several others) and from the Romanian poetry of Ileana Mӑlӑncioiu The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012). With Medbh McGuckian\, Ní Chuilleanáin also co-translated the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in The Water Horse (2001). \nSpeaker:\n\nEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, the late Leland Bardwell and the late Pearse Hutchinson\, she is a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/eilean-ni-chuilleanain-27-feb/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,lecture,poetry
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170130T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170130T203000
DTSTAMP:20260420T140043
CREATED:20161208T132154Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230959Z
UID:8719-1485804600-1485808200@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Sebastian Barry - 30 Jan
DESCRIPTION:The great Irish writer Sebastian Barry visits the ILS on 30 January to join in conversation with Prof Roy Foster about his new novel Days Without End. \nThe novel continues Barry’s saga of two Irish families\, the Dunnes and the McNultys\, which has spanned several novels and multiple time frames and locations. The Guardian has called the sequence ‘one of the most compelling\, bravura and heart-wrenching fictional projects of recent memory.’A beautiful\, savage\, tender\, searing work of art. Sentence after perfect sentence it grips and does not let go.Donal Ryan \n‘Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending\,\nbut something that would go on for ever\, all rested and stopped in that moment.\nHard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you\nnever had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I\nam thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now…’ \nAfter signing up for the US army in the 1850s\, aged barely seventeen\, Thomas\nMcNulty and his brother-in-arms\, John Cole\, go on to fight in the Indian wars and\,\nultimately\, the Civil War. Having fled terrible hardships themselves\, they find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder\, despite the horrors they both witness and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and endangered when a young Indian girl crosses their path\, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges\, if only they can survive.A violent\, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making [and] the most fascinating line-by-line first person narration I’ve come across in years.Kazuo Ishiguro \nMoving from the plains of the West to Tennessee\, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt\, and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America’s past\, Days Without End is a novel never to be forgotten. \nSpeakers:\n\nSebastian Barry\nSebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels and plays have won the Costa Book of the Year award\, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize\, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year\, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also had two consecutive novels\, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008)\, shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow.\n\n\nProf Roy Foster\nRoy 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.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/sebastian-barry-30-jan/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:America,book signing,history,interview,novel,Reading
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SUMMARY:Ó Conaire in London - 18 May
DESCRIPTION:The ILS / ITS Noel O’Connell Annual Memorial Lecture will be given by Dr Pádraigín Riggs on the subject of ‘The role of London in the life and work of Pádraic Ó Conaire (1882-1928)’. This lecture is organised in conjunction with the Irish Texts Society. \nPádraig Ó Conaire was born in Galway city in 1882 and died in Dublin in 1928. From 1900 to 1915 he lived in London\, where he was employed as a civil servant at the Board of Education. During this period he was a teacher of Irish in classes organised by the Gaelic League and London County Council and took part in plays staged by the League. One of the most distinguished and prolific of the writers of the early Irish-language Revival\, he published over 400 short stories\, over 200 essays\, one novel and a small number of plays. His novel Deoraíocht (1910) was largely set in London and it has been described by James M. Cahalan (The Irish Novel: A Critical History) as “the most innovative\, forward looking Irish novel in either language…before the arrival of Joyce as a novelist…”\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society:\n\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nDr Pádraigín Riggs\nDr Pádraigín Riggs was a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Modern Irish\, UCC\, until her recent retirement. She has published studies of the Irish-language writers Donncha Ó Céileachair and Pádraic Ó Conaire\, and she is currently engaged in writing a biography of Eleanor Hull\, who was a President of the Irish Literary Society and one of the founders of the Irish Texts Society\, and its first Honorary Secretary. As well as her prolific academic writing on modern Irish-language literature she is also an established literary critic in that area. She is a member of the Council of the Irish Texts Society and is secretary of the committee that organises the annual Irish Texts Society/UCC Irish Departments Seminar and has edited three volumes of that Seminar’s Proceedings in the ITS Subsidiary Series. She has a deep interest in the history of the Irish in London.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/o-conaire-in-london-18-may/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:biography,Collaboration,history,Irish language,lecture
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