BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Irish Literary Society - ECPv6.16.2//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Irish Literary Society REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20190331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20191027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20200329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20201025T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20210328T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20211031T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20220327T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20221030T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20230326T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20231029T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20240331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20241027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20250330T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20251026T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20260329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20261025T010000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:UTC BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:UTC DTSTART:20160101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20251125T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20251125T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20251104T000950Z LAST-MODIFIED:20251125T161031Z UID:21086-1764099000-1764104400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Arlen House 50th - 25 November DESCRIPTION:We are sorry to report that we will not be joined tonight by Nuala O’Connor as planned. Our apologies\, this is due to unforeseen circumstances preventing her travel. We have more than a dozen poets reading their poems and reflecting on the work of the press.\n\n\nWe’re delighted to welcome back to the Society Nuala O’Connor and Alan Hayes representing Arlen House as we celebrate the 50th anniversary of this pioneering press with a group of writers drawn from the latest in the Washing Windows series of poetry collections: Washing Windows V: Women Revolutionise Irish Poetry\, 1975–2025\, the largest anthology of Irish women poets ever published. The night will also feature the London launch of O’Connor’s latest collection\, Menagerie. Washing Windows V is the final volume in the series honouring the groundbreaking work of publishers Catherine Rose and Eavan Boland\, Arlen House’s pioneering editors in the 1970s and 1980s. \n\n\n\nThe first Arlen House book came out in September 1975\, the same month that Virago in London published their first book. The first Virago book was a gentle oral history of women in the Lake District while the first Arlen House was a radical exposé of women’s lives in 20th century Ireland and the controlling power of the Church.Alan Hayes\n\n\n\nCatherine Rose founded Arlen House\, Ireland’s first feminist press\, in Galway during the 1975 International Women’s Year. The press’s early work focused on championing women’s writing in Ireland\, the first publication was Rose’s The Female Experience: The Story of the Woman Movement in Ireland\, the work of Margaret Mac Curtain\, Janet Martin\, and Terry Prone featured and the Press revived the work of neglected writers such as such as Kate O’Brien and Norah Hoult. Since 1999 the extraordinarily prolific editor and publisher Alan Hayes has run the press.\n\n\n\n\n\n \nThe event will be followed by a booksale and signing. Tickets available below or you can purchase membership from the shop page which covers all tickets for the 2025-6 season. \n\n\n Speakers: Nuala O'Connor\n\n\n\n Nuala O’Connor\nNuala O’Connor was born in Dublin\, Ireland\, in 1970. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin\, she is a novelist and short story writer and lives in County Galway with her husband and three children. Nuala has won many prizes for her short fiction including the Short Story Prize in the UK and Ireland’s Francis MacManus Award. She is editor at flash e-zine Splonk. Nora was her fifth novel\, she is also the author of several short story and poetry collections\, Menagerie being the latest.. \n\nAlan Hayes\n Alan Hayes\nAlan Hayes is publisher and editor of Arlen House\, Ireland’s oldest feminist press\, specialising in equality and diversity. \n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/arlen-house-50th-25-november/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,feminism,history,interview,Irish language,publishing,Reading,special event,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/arlen-at-50.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20240531T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20240531T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20240428T215357Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240529T020520Z UID:20316-1717183800-1717189200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Rónán Hession - 31 May DESCRIPTION:The Society welcomes back Rónán Hession for the London launch of his latest novel. The author will be discussing Ghost Mountain with the author and TLS critic David Collard. There will be an audience Q&A followed by a book signing\, a glass of wine is included in the ticket price. \nGhost Mountain is a mountain that appears suddenly\, changing the lives of the characters in the surrounding community: the town drunk\, the Clerk of Maps (Acting)\, a retired art teacher and her dog\, a young soul and his wife who is an old soul. To them\, Ghost Mountain is unmistakably present but never truly fathomable – it is timeless\, profound\, spiritual even\, and yet resists everything projected onto it. Ghost Mountain is a novel that looks at the uncertain sense of self that we project onto the world and the absences that shadow and shape our lives. \nGod\, what a voice Ronan has. It is spectacular and already feels like a cult classic. I was absolutely hookedDonal Ryan on Leonard and Hungry Paul\n
\n Speakers and performers: \n  \n David Collard\n\n\n\n David Collard\nDavid Collard is a London-based writer\, reviewer\, researcher\, editor and occasional broadcaster\, appearing regularly in the Times Literary Supplement\, Literary Review and elsewhere\, in print and online. Previous titles include About a Girl\, a reader’s guide to Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-formed Thing (C B Editions\, 2016).Find out more on David’s website. \n\nRónán Hession\n\n\n\n Rónán Hession\nRónán Hession is a writer and musician based in Dublin. His debut novel\, Leonard and Hungry Paul\, was published by Bluemoose Books in 2019. The book was shortlisted for numerous awards and chosen by the Sunday Times as one of the 50 great Irish novels of the 21st century. Ronán’s second novel Panenka was widely acclaimed. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ronan-hession-31-may/ LOCATION:Fitzrovia Chapel\, Fitzroy Place\, 2 Pearson Square\, London W1T 3BF\, London\, Fitzrovia Chapel\, Fitzroy Place\, 2 PeW1T 3BF\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,novel,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/ghost-mountain.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20231127T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20231127T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20231008T180552Z LAST-MODIFIED:20231121T133218Z UID:20028-1701113400-1701118800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Resting Places - 27 Nov DESCRIPTION:Join us for the London launch of a fascinating new work by Dr Ellen McWilliams. Resting Places: On Wounds\, War and the Irish Revolution could be read as a memoir or a collection of personal essays\, but it is neither – literary scholar Lucy McDiarmid describes it as ‘the creation of a new literary form’. Resting Places offers up an Irishwoman’s elegy for two revolutionists\, Oliver Cromwell and Terence James MacSwiney\, a meditation on the unexpected correspondences between the English Civil War of the seventeenth century and the Irish Civil War of the 1920s\, a prayer to John Milton and William Shakespeare\, and a keen for a Famine Road and for the troubled history of the plantation town of Bandon in Co. Cork. The book emerged from an article in the Irish Times. \nAt the centre of McWilliams’s threnody is a massacre that took place a century ago in West Cork but might as well have been yesterday. It is unforgotten and will continue to be so as her son learns about that “exquisitely painful” time and finds the solace she found in taut prose which is a balm even though it treats of colonial crimes\, republican crimes\, the contagion of faith\, the weight of history and fractured families.’Jonathan Meades\n\nMcWilliams reflects on her Catholic upbringing in West Cork in the 1980s and 1990s\, and on relations with her Protestant neighbours. She is haunted by the killings in the period of Ireland’s War of Independence and Civil War\, and in particular by the ‘Dunmanway massacre’ of April 1922 which marked the area where she grew up. Her great grandmother was active in Cumann na mBan and her granduncle fought for independence as well as in the anti-Treaty IRA. The book reveals why the events of those days remain deeply personal and how they shape her adult life as she moves to England\, marries an expert on Cromwell and the English Civil War\, teaches Irish literature at an English university\, experiences pregnancy and childbirth\, and nurtures her son in his early years. \nImage: Crowds of onlookers throng St Patrick St on the day following the burning of Cork City centre by crown forces. \n The event will be followed by a signing. \n\n\n \n  \n Speakers: Dr Ellen McWilliams\n\n\n\n Dr Ellen McWilliams\nDr Williams’ interests are in the fields of twentieth-century women’s fiction\, anti-colonial history and the aftershocks of colonial violence\, intergenerational memory/postmemory\, literary responses to the pain of revolution and civil war\, political violence and literary form\, and migration and diasporic identity. She is a member of the Routes: Migraton\, Mobility\, Displacement Network and the Centre for Histories of Violence and Conflict. She has written three academic books\, Margaret Atwood and the Female Bildungsroman (2009)\, Women and Exile in Contemporary Irish Fiction (2013)\, and Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities (2021). She is a member of the University’s research network\, Routes: Migration\, Mobility\, Displacement. She also has a special interest in New York magazine culture and has published four essays on Maeve Brennan’s writing for The New Yorker\, including ‘”A Sort of Rathmines Version of a Dior Design”: Maeve Brennan\, Self-Fashioning\, and the Uses of Style’ for Women: A Cultural Review and an article on Brennan’s years at Harper’s Bazaar\, ‘Maeve Brennan\, Celebrity\, and Harper’s Bazaar in the 1940s’. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/resting-places-27-november/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,book signing,feminism,interview,Nationalism,Reading,research,social history,violence,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/resting-places-redo.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230925T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230925T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20230905T161850Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230907T231545Z UID:19758-1695670200-1695675600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:A Thread of Violence - 25 Sept DESCRIPTION:Mark O’Connell’s latest book\, A Thread of Violence\, concerns the murders committed by Malcolm Macarthur in 1982 of a nurse\, Bridie Gargan\, and a farmer\, Dónal Dunne. It is both an utterly compelling account of one of Ireland’s most notorious crimes and an interrogation of the nature of true crime writing itself. When Macarthur\, the heir to a small fortune\, found himself suddenly without money\, he decided to rob a bank. To do this\, he would need a gun and a car. In the process of procuring them\, he killed two people\, and the circumstances of his eventual arrest nearly brought down the Irish government. When Mark O’Connell set out to unravel the mysteries still surrounding these horrific and inexplicable crimes\, he tracked down Macarthur himself\, living out his days in Dublin. O’Connell will be in conversation with Brian Dillon. In A Thread of Violence Mark O’Connell has investigated\, with immense skill and insight\, the mind of a double murderer\, and in the process has shown the essential mysteriousness of such a mind-perhaps of any mind. The result is a beautifully wrought narrative that is at once frightening and thrilling. A masterly workJohn Banville\n\nThis event will be followed by a signing and a book sale. \n \n  \n Speakers: Mark O'Connell\n\n\n\n Mark O’Connell\nMark O’Connell is an award-winning Irish writer. He previously visited the ILS to discuss his first book\, To Be a Machine\, which won the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize and was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize. In 2019\, he became the first ever non-fiction writer to win the prestigious Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. His second book\, Notes From an Apocalypse was longlisted for the Wainwright Prize. He is a contributor to the New York Review of Books\, and his work has appeared in the New Yorker. \n\nBrian Dillon\n\n\n\n Brian Dillon Name\nProf Dillon studied English and Philosophy at University College Dublin\, and completed a Ph.D. (on concepts of time in twentieth-century criticism and theory) at the University of Kent in 1999. Before joining Queen Mary in 2019\, he was head of the Writing programme at the Royal College of Art. His first book\, a memoir titled In the Dark Room\, was published in 2005. His creative and critical writing has appeared in publications such as the Guardian\, The London Review of Books\, Artforum\, The New York Times\, The New Yorker\, Granta and The White Review. Dillon has curated exhibitions for Tate and Hayward galleries\, and is an editor at Cabinet\, an arts and culture magazine based in New York. \n\n\n\n\nTickets at our Shop page. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/a-thread-of-violence-25-sept/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:crime,history,interview,research,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/thread-of-violence.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230412T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230412T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20230406T091829Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230406T101506Z UID:19676-1681327800-1681333200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Nicole Flattery - 12 April 2023 DESCRIPTION:New York in the late 1960s: Mae escapes a run-down an apartment\, an alcoholic mother and her mother’s occasional boyfriend to a new life as a typist for Andy Warhol\, transcribing conversations with his friends and associates to provide the material for an unconventional novel. A mordantly funny investigation of celebrity\, obsession\, womanhood and sexuality\, Nothing Special (Bloomsbury) is itself an unconventional debut novel\, following on from Flattery’s acclaimed short story collection Show Them a Good Time. Nicole will join with James Conor Patterson in conversation on her writing and Nothing Special. \n\n …the thrilling sense of Flattery’s aesthetic and intellectual stringency is what comes to define her seemingly low-key enterprise here. You could almost imagine someone reading Nothing Special and not even noticing Warhol at its heart\, which may be the point of a novel that pictures the lives of his unseen instruments.Anthony Cummins\, The Guardian\n\n\n\n  \n Speakers and performers: Nicole Flattery\n\n\n\n Nicole Flattery\nNicole Flattery is the author of the story collection Show Them A Good Time. She is the winner of An Post Irish Book Award\, the Kate O’Brien Prize\, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction\, and the White Review Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in the Stinging Fly\, the Guardian\, the White Review\, and the London Review of Books. A graduate of the master’s program in creative writing at Trinity College\, Dublin\, she lives in Galway\, Ireland. \n\nJames Conor Patterson\n\n\n\n James Conor Patterson\nJames is the author of the poetry collection ‘Bandit Country’ just released by Picador. He is also the editor of the anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian\, i-D\, The Irish Times\, Magma\, The Moth\, Morning Star\, New Statesman\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Poetry London\, Poetry Review\, RTÉ Culture\, The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine\, among others. \n\n\n\n\n\nThe event will be followed by a sale and signing. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/nicole-flattery-12-april-2023/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:America,book signing,emigration,interview,music,politics,Reading,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Nothing-Special.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230327T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230327T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20221205T175715Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230316T092321Z UID:19577-1679945400-1679950800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Jess Kidd and Mike Dash on the Batavia - 27 March DESCRIPTION:We’re delighted to welcome back Jess Kidd to the Society to discuss her novel\, The Night Ship. The novel is based on the extraordinary story of the Batavia\, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company that in 1628 was wrecked on Morning Reef\, on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off western coast of Australia. Its wrecking was followed by factions in the crew instigating a massacre of most of the survivors. This was amongst the first contacts of europeans with the continent of Australia and provides a brutal alternative to the myth of Cook’s arrival bringing Enlightenment values.\n\nJess will be joined by the historian Mike Dash whose fascinating account of the Batavia story\, Batavia’s Graveyard (2002) opens up a wider history of the Dutch Republic\, seventeenth century trade and exploration. In both Dash’s history and Kidd’s novel the later discovery of the Batavia and its archeological recovery feature. Kidd establishes a connection over the span of centuries via the lives of two young characters: in 1628 a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and\, in the 1980s\, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island. Dash’s book was the invaluable starting point to Kidd’s research which led her from Haarlem and Amsterdam to Australia. The wreck was discovered in 1963\, over the next two decades\, archaeological excavations of the ship and various campsites evidenced the extent of the savage campaign. Find out more about Kidd’s research trip on her site: jesskidd.com \n\nLyrical\, haunting\, a beautiful and elegant fictional interpretation of history\, I loved it.Kate Mosse on Kidd's The Night Ship\nScholarly and exhilarating. Not only history\, but an enthralling sea yarn and true-crime thriller.Associated Press on Dash's Batavia's Graveyard\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis event will be followed by a signing and a book sale. \n\n Speakers: Jess Kidd\n\n\n\n Jess Kidd\nJess Kidd is the author of three novels and is the winner of the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. Jess’ debut novel\, Himself\, was published by Canongate in October 2016. The Hoarder\, her second novel\, hit the shelves in February 2018. Jess’s third book the marvellous Victorian\, supernatural thriller\, Things in Jars came out in 2019 featuring the intrepid detective Bridie Devine. She is also currently developing her own original TV projects with leading UK and international TV producers\, her children’s book Everyday Magic was published in 2020. Find out more on her website: jesskidd.com \n\nMike Dash\n\n\n\n Mike Dash\nDash read history at Cambridge and went on to complete a PhD back in 1990. Since then he has enjoyed an eclectic career as a journalist\, magazine publisher and author\, in the course of which he has written five heavily-researched and acclaimed books: Tulipomania\, Batavia’s Graveyard\, Thug\, Satan’s Circus and The First Family. He has also run the Smithsonian Museum’s history blog. Find out more on his website: mikedash.com URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/jess-kidd-and-mike-dash-on-the-batavia-27-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Australia,book signing,history,interview,Mutiny,naval history,novel,politics,religion,research,social history,violence ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Batavia-night-ship-date-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20220909T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20220909T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20190413T191332Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220909T220842Z UID:11596-1662751800-1662757200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Essaying the Body\, Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - 5 June DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine join the ILS to discuss their recent books of essays. Pine’s winning last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year seemed to mark a reemergence of the essay form in Irish literature. Perhaps the flourishing of literary journals in Ireland has encouraged this\, perhaps the renewed appreciation of Hubert Butler’s work has been an influence\, certainly his cosmopolitan sensibility is present in the recent creative non-fiction of Brian Dillon\, Kevin Breathnach\, Ian Maleney… I’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question\, each dilemma\, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone\, especially young women and men\, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.Martina Evans in the Irish Times on Notes to Self\n  \nThe personal essays of Pine and Gleeson share the ambition of those authors\, yet move inward reflecting on their own bodily traumas and the politics of the female body in Ireland in the last 50 years. In its variously raw\, funny\, acute manner Pine’s vivid collection addresses addiction\, fertility\, feminism\, sexual violence and depression. The formal experimentation of Gleeson’s Constellations is startling\, throughout this intimate account of pain is illuminating of art and the wider world. \n \n  \nSpeaker: Sinéad Gleeson\n\n\n \nSinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays\, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta\, Winter Papers and Gorse\, and a story of hers will appear in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short story anthologies\, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland\, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is working on a novel. \n  \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Dr Emilie Pine\n\n\n \nEmilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies\, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave\, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance\, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press\, 2019). Her first collection of personal essays\, Notes to Self\, was published by Tramp Press (2018). \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/essaying_the_body/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,feminism,history,interview,lecture,medical,nature,Reading,research,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/essaying-the-body.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211208T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211208T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20211124T131829Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211129T132341Z UID:18732-1638991800-1638997200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Brian Moore at 100 - 8 Dec DESCRIPTION:To mark the centenary of the birth of Belfast-born writer Brian Moore (1921-1999) Brian Moore at 100 and the Irish Literary Society have partnered to screen The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (7 December) and deliver tonight’s talk with Dr Sinéad Moynihan and Lucy Caldwell. \n\nDesigned to coincide with the centenary of his birth\, the Exeter University project has sought to critically appraise\, and thus revive scholarly and public interest in\, the work of neglected and important Belfast-born writer\, Brian Moore (1921- 1999). Moore was the author of twenty-six novels in diverse genres and a transnational subject who lived most of his adult life in Canada and the U.S. Our talk and the project more generally invite and stimulate a fresh look at Moore’s multi-genre literary career.\n\nSpeaker: Lucy Caldwell\n\n\n \nCaldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels and several stage plays and radio dramas. Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature\, the Dylan Thomas Prize\, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright\, the BBC Stewart Parker Award\, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her debut collection of short stories\, Multitudes\, was published by Faber in 2016\, of it she has written ‘…the music of Van Morrison in general and of Astral Weeks in particular is something of a guiding spirit to my stories.’ Lucy is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber\, 2019); she is the 2021 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award for her story ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad‘.Lucy Caldwell will publish her long-awaited fourth novel These Days in March 2022. \n\nSpeaker: Professor Sinéad Moynihan\n\n\n\nProfessor Sinéad Moynihan is an American Studies specialist her research interests include Transatlantic Literary Studies and\, particularly\, the Irish Atlantic. Her third monograph\, Ireland\, Migration and Return Migration: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination\, 1952 to Present was published by Liverpool UP in March 2019 and was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies. She is the co-investigator on the British Academy / Leverhulme funded project\, Brian Moore at 100.\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/brian-moore-at-100/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:adaptation,America,anniversary,Belfast,biography,documentary,interview,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/moore-conversation-slider-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20211015T053505Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211028T094614Z UID:18465-1637004600-1637010000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Reflections from the Border - 15 November DESCRIPTION:  \n\nAs tension persists over the future of the Protocol and frustration is leading to renewed speculation of the possibility of a United Ireland we engage with four writers whose work is gathered in a landmark new anthology reflecting on the border. The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island\, 2021) is a landmark anthology of fiction\, non-fiction and poetry. Amid renewed international focus on the border in Ireland the anthology contributors Darran Anderson\, Jill Crawford\, Michael Hughes\, Séamus O’Reilly and editor James Conor Patterson join us to read from their work and discuss the meaning of partition in the 21st century for those people that inhabit the divide. \n\n\nThe idea for the book has been on my mind for some time now\, probably since the Brexit vote when it became apparent that there would be consequences for freedom of movement across the Irish border. I quickly found that for all the news reports\, vox pops and column inches being filled\, very often the voices which were left out of the conversation were the ones most affected by it\, and I wanted to redress that balance by giving border writers the opportunity to speak their truths. Working with New Island on this book has been an absolute dream\, and given that they are behind some of the most important anthologies of Irish writing to date\, I can’t wait to share this latest project with the world. — James Conor Patterson\, Anthology Editor. \n\n\nThe New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021) \n  \n\n  \n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n\nSpeaker: Darran Anderson\n\n\n \nDarran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (2015)\, chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ by the Financial Times\, the Guardian\, the A.V. Club and others\, and described by the Guardian as ‘a dizzying and brilliant piece of creative non-fiction’. He has co-edited The Honest Ulsterman\, 3:AM Magazine\, Dogmatika and White Noise. He writes for the likes of the Atlantic\, frieze magazine\, and Magnum\, and has given talks at the V&A\, the LSE\, the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Venice Biennale. \n  \nSpeaker: Jill Crawford\n\n\n \nJill is a rural Northern Irish writer\, based in London. Fiction at Stinging Fly\, n+1\, Winter Papers\, Stranger’s Guide\, and Faber’s ‘Being Various’: New Irish Short Stories. \n  \n \nSpeaker: Michael Hughes\n\n\n \nMichael Hughes grew up in Keady\, Co. Armagh\, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh and read English at Corpus Christi College\, Oxford before training in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He has worked for many years as an actor under the professional name Michael Colgan\, and he also teaches creative writing. His first novel\, The Countenance Divine\, was published by John Murray in 2016. He previously spoke at the ILS on his widely praised second novel Country (Hodder & Stoughton\, 2018). \n  \n  \n \nSpeaker: Séamas O’Reilly\n\n\n \nSéamas O’Reilly is a columnist for the Observer and writes about media and politics for the Irish Times\, New Statesman\, Guts and VICE. He shot to a kind-of prominence with a range of online endeavours including ‘Remembering Ireland’\, a parody of Irish nostalgia sites\, which featured entirely invented moments from Irish history. In 2016\, he posted a long Twitter thread about the effects Brexit would have on Northern Ireland\, which led to his first political writing for the New Statesman. Later on that year\, his exasperated reviews of the novels of erstwhile footballer and manager Steve Bruce led to his participation in events with Guardian Football Weekly and various others. Séamas lives in Hackney with his family. \n  \n\nSpeaker: James Conor Patterson\n\n\n \nJames is the editor of the anthology in discussion The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021). He is also author of the poetry collection ‘Bandit Country’ forthcoming from Picador in Autumn 2022. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian\, i-D\, The Irish Times\, Magma\, The Moth\, Morning Star\, New Statesman\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Poetry London\, Poetry Review\, RTÉ Culture\, The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine\, among others. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/reflections-from-the-border-15-november/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,documentary,history,interview,politics,publishing,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/new-frontier-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20211015T034805Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T090439Z UID:18449-1636399800-1636405200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Irish-London - 8 November DESCRIPTION:Professor Richard Kirkland joins in conversation with Roy Foster\, the Society’s Vice President\, on Kirkland’s new book Irish London: A Cultural History 1850–1916 (London: Bloomsbury\, 2021). In the years following the Irish Famine (1845–52)\, London became one of the cities of Ireland. The number of Irish in London swelled to over 100\,000 and from this mass migration emerged a distinctive and vibrant culture based on a shared sense of history\, identity and experience. In this book\, Richard Kirkland brings together elements in Irish London’s culture and history that had previously only been understood separately or indeed largely overlooked (as in the case of women’s’ contributions to London Irish politics and culture). In particular\, Kirkland makes resonant cultural connections between Irish and cockney performers in the music halls\, Irish trade fairs\, temperance marches\, the Fenian dynamite war of the 1880s\, St Patrick’s Day events\, and the later cultural agitation of revivalists such as W.B. Yeats and Katharine Tynan. \n  \n\nSpeaker: Professor Richard Kirkland\n\n\n \nRichard Kirkland is Professor of Irish Literature & Cultural Theory at King’s College London. Professor Kirkland’s research is focused on the literature\, culture\, and politics of Ireland in the modern period of contemporary Northern Ireland\, during the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century\, and in the context of the Irish in London. He has written four monographs and co-edited two collections of essays grouped around these areas. \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Roy Foster Roy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914 came out in 2014 and his most recent work On Seamus Heaney (Princeton\, 2020) came out last year and is the subject of an ILS film with Roy and Catherine Heaney.\n  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/irish-london-8-november/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:emigration,history,interview,London-Irish,politics,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IRISH-LONDON-SS.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20200126T204729Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200404T103549Z UID:16823-1588015800-1588021200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Moth\, 10th Anniversary - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. \nJoin the Society to celebrate the 10th birthday of The Moth\, one of Ireland’s foremost art and literature magazines. Founded in 2010 by Rebecca O’Connor and Will Govan\, The Moth features poetry\, short fiction and art by established and up-and-coming writers and artists. Each issue also hosts two interviews – with writers such as Sally Rooney\, Sharon Olds\, Colm Toibin and Paul Muldoon. They also publish The Caterpillar and run several art and literary prizes\, including one of the biggest prizes in the world for a single poem. \n  \nWill and Rebecca will regale you with stories about The Moth\, which they run from their home in rural Ireland\, and will be joined by a stellar line-up of past contributors including the novelist Thomas Maloney\, former Moth Poetry Prizewinners Ann Gray and Abigail Parry\, the winner of The Moth Short Story Prize 2019 Conor Crummey\, and newcomers Mark Lawlor and Bryony Littlefair (who recently won a Moth Retreat Bursary). \n\n ‘Exquisitely designed and choc-a-bloc with exciting new artworks and wordworks.’Paul Durcan‘If you want to keep your finger on the pulse\, The Moth magazine is all you need.’Christine Dwyer Hickey \n  \nCopies of The Moth will be available for sale at the event. \n  \nSpeaker: Conor Crummey\n\n\n \nConor Crummey’s story ‘Journeys’ was chosen by author Kit de Waal as the winner of the €3\,000 Moth Short Story Prize 2019. Crummey\, from Belfast\, now lives in London\, where he is a lecturer in public law at Queen Mary University of London. Follow Conor on twitter: @ConorCrummey \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Will Govan\n \n\n\n \nWill Govan is co-founder and director of The Moth. He studied portraiture at The Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and paints at The Moth Studios in Cavan Town in Ireland. He had his first solo exhibition\, Shark With Plunger & Other Paintings\, at the Johnston Central Library in Cavan in July 2019 Follow Will on twitter: @WillGovan1 \n  \nSpeaker: Ann Gray\n \n\n\n \nThe author of a number of collections including Painting Skin (Fatchance Press\, 1995) and The Man I Was Promised (Headland\, 2004)\, Ann was commended for the National Poetry Competition 2010 and won the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2014. \n  \nSpeaker: Bryony Littlefair\n\n\n \nBryony Littlefair is a poet and workshop facilitator living in South London. Her pamphlet Giraffe won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize in 2017 and is out now with Seren Books. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and in 2019 received the Moth Retreat Bursary Award. Follow Bryony on twitter: @B_Littlefair \n  \n \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Thomas Maloney\n\n\n \nThomas Maloney was born in Kent in 1979\, grew up in London\, and studied Physics at Oxford. His first novel\, The Sacred Combe\, was published in 2016. He lives in Oxfordshire with his family. \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Rebecca O’Connor\n\n\n \nRebecca is co-founder and director of The Moth. She edits and designs The Moth and The Caterpillar. Her debut poetry collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Strong Shine Award and she is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize from Poetry Review. Her debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other was published by Canongate in 2018. Follow Rebecca on twitter: @RebeccaMoth \n  \nSpeaker: Abigail Parry\n\nAbigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work\, including the Ballymaloe Prize\, the Troubadour Prize\, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection\, Jinx\, published by Bloodaxe in 2018\, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. Follow Abigail on twitter: @ginpitnancy \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-moth-10th-anniversary-27-april/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,art,Collaboration,history,interview,poetry,Reading,short story,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/moth-slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200325T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200325T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20200126T102708Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200404T111910Z UID:16767-1585164600-1585168200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Christine Dwyer Hickey - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. WE WILL LOOK TO RESCHEDULE IN THE COMING MONTHS \n\n\nThe Society is delighted to partner with the Dublin City Council for a second year to deliver an event on the Dublin One City One Book choice. This year’s choice is Tatty by Christine Dwyer Hickey. Dublin One City One Book is a Dublin City Council initiative\, led by Dublin City Libraries it encourages reading for pleasure through a myriad of free public events throughout the month\, held in libraries\, galleries\, theatres and museums. We will also be joining with the Hammersmith Irish Cultural Centre’s Book Club for this event and encourage all attendees to read Tatty in preparation for the event. The special edition for this years celebration will be available at our February Ciaran Carson event. \nTatty is the story of a Dublin family as told through the eyes of one of its children over a ten year period. During this time we see the destruction brought about by alcoholism as one little girl tries to come to terms with her parents’ drinking. This is the story of a disturbed childhood\, yet it is also filled with humour and love. Chapter by chapter\, the child’s voice matures and her perception becomes more honed; we are left with a stunning portrait of a disintegrating family and the child lost within it. Dorothy Allen is a former BBC journalist\, currently writing for the German and Swiss Press\, she will join Dwyer Hickey in conversation. \n Dwyer Hickey’s mastery of the child’s voice is spectacular and her acute understanding of the mentality of children leads to some hilarious moments.Sunday Tribune \n Image: Drawing of a Young Girl\, Joseph Syddall\, 1891 \n  \nPresented in association with the Dublin One City One Book: \n \n  \nSpeaker: Christine Dwyer Hickey\n \nChristine Dwyer Hickey is a novelist\, playwright and short story writer. She has published eight novels\, one collection of short stories and a full-length play. \nTatty was published by New Island Books (2004) and by Vintage UK (2005). It was shortlisted for Irish Novel of The Year 2005\, listed as one of the 50 Irish Novels of the Decade at the Irish Book Awards 2010 and was nominated for the Orange Prize (now the Women’s Fiction Prize). Her latest novel The Narrow Land (Atlantic UK 2019) is set on Cape Cod in 1950 and examines the turbulent marriage of American artists Edward and Jo Hopper. Christine’s stories have been published in anthologies and magazines worldwide and have won several awards the most recent of which was at for her story Back to Bones at the Irish Book Awards Short Story of the Year Award 2017. Her play Snow Angels premiered at the Project Arts Theatre in 2014. Her work has been widely translated into European and Arabic languages and she is an elected member of Aosdána\, the Irish academy of arts. \n \nTatty: Dublin One City\, One Book edition URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/christine-dwyer-hickey-25-march/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:children,interview,novel,social history,special event,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Christine-Hickey.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191125T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191125T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20190915T181936Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200203T214611Z UID:12390-1574710200-1574713800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Polly Devlin\, Writing Home - 25 Nov DESCRIPTION:Polly Devlin joins Joan Bakewell to discuss the latest collection of her work\, Writing Home\, and to reflect on a rich career as a writer\, her working as features editor of Vogue in London in the Swinging Sixties\, to encounters with Bob Dylan\, Janis Joplin\, Barbara Streisand\, John Lennon…In the pieces brought together in Writing Home\, Polly Devlin OBE\, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where\, in the late 1950s\, the first electricity poles looked ‘literally out of place’); her sudden transition\, at the age of twenty-one\, to Swinging Sixties London\, where she worked for Vogue and became very much part of the scene (although – ‘it’s like being a provincial at Versailles’)\, on to New York\, back to London\, then to the English countryside\, and to Paris\, Venice\, the world over – and always back to Ireland\, London and New York. \nShe writes about the people she has known\, among them Yoko Ono\, Mick Jagger\, Peggy Guggenheim\, Diana Vreeland (‘as fantastical as a unicorn’)\, Jean Shrimpton (‘she looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance’)\, Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up\, ‘which I gabbled she didn’t need to – she looked at me frostily and the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid’). And she writes about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration\, feminism (‘I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and women were secondary’)\, reading\, writing\, collecting\, shopping\, houses\, dogs\, rooks\, hares\, dreams\, friendship and the kindness of strangers; about daughters and mothers. \n \n \n\n“…affectionate sketches of friends including Nuala O’Faolain and her brother-in-law Seamus Heaney…ring with truth and tenderness.”Irish Times\n\nThe event will be followed by a book sale and signing by the author. \n  \nOur thanks to the publishers of Writing Home: \n  \n\nSpeaker: Joan Bakewell\n\n\nJoan Bakewell has a distinguished career as an author\, journalist and broadcaster. She has served on the board of the National Theatre and as Chair of the British Film Institute and of the National Campaign for the Arts. Joan was made a CBE is 1999 and Dame in 2008. In January 2011 she took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport. In April 2013\, she became President of Birkbeck College.She has led some of the BBC’s most well-remembered documentaries and news programmes\, challenging taboos around sex; examining religion from a critical\, objective standpoint; and being a champion for arts and culture and their relevance to life. \n\n  \nSpeaker: Polly Devlin\n\n\nPolly Devlin is a writer\, broadcaster and filmmaker. She holds an OBE for services to literature. After spending her childhood in Northern Ireland\, at the age of twenty-two she took up her first job – as a writer\, and soon features editor\, on British Vogue\, at the heart of 1960s London. A couple of years later she was again transported\, to New York\, to work for Diana Vreeland on American Vogue – where\, once more\, she was very much part of the scene she wrote about in her newspaper column and articles including for The Sunday Times\, New Statesman and Observer. Her first book\, All of Us There\, is now a Virago Modern Classic. The most recent\, New York: Places to Write Home About (Pimpernel Press\, 2017; published in the United States by Gibbs Smith\, as New York: Behind Closed Doors) was greeted with delight on both sides of the Atlantic. She now divides her time between London and New York\, where\, until her recent retirement\, she taught Creative Non-Fiction at Barnard College\, Columbia University. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/polly-devlin-writing-home-25-nov/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,exile,feminism,interview,Reading,research,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/polly-devlin-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191028T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191028T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20190913T151626Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220909T174253Z UID:12299-1572291000-1572296400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Belfast Agreement and Brexit - 28 Oct DESCRIPTION:As we approach yet another Brexit deadline (31 October) the Society has banded-together with the Irish Pages journal to reflect on the Belfast Agreement of 1998 and to consider possible futures for the union\, Anglo-Irish relations\, power sharing and the border. The current special issue of Irish Pages is given over to reflections on the agreement. The essays and poetry therein record not just relief that peace was achieved in Northern Ireland but anger at the compromises of the agreement and frustration at the lack of representation throughout the two years since the breakdown of power sharing: the devolved executive and assembly which have powers over the region collapsed in January 2017. The region currently holds the world record for the longest period without a sitting government\, which it passed after 589 days. \nThe UK’s future in the EU remains uncertain\, the referendum result and ongoing political turmoil leaves the country in a febrile atmosphere. Before some definitive point is reached we are inviting a range of voices (political\, poetic\, academic) to consider the probity of past choices\, the problems caused by the current vacuum and what comes next. The event will be followed by a sale and signing of the Irish Pages journal. \n   \nIn diametric opposition to The Agreement\, like (dog-) whistling in the dark\, the Brexit vote preceded (incredibly now) its assumed unknown text. It has taken most of three years to come up with even the first stage of this massive modern codex – with many more scrolls and codicils to come\, if in fact Brexit does materialize.Chris Agee\, editor of Irish Pages\n  \nSince the Good Friday Agreement had concluded without any discussion on what constituted the seeds of the conflict\, it was unsurprising that the legacy of the past turned up as a troubling spectre over its future.Monica McWilliams\, Making and implementing the Agreement in Irish Pages \nSpeaker: Chris Agee\n\n\n \nA poet\, essayist and photographer\, Chris Agee is the Editor of Irish Pages. His third collection of poems\, Next to Nothing (Salt\, 2008)\, was shortlisted in Britain for the 2009 Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry. He recently edited Balkan Essays (The Irish Pages Press\, 2016)\, the sixth volume of Hubert Butler’s essays. His fourth collection of poems\, Blue Sandbar Moon (The Irish Pages Press) appeared in 2018. He lives in Belfast\, and divides his time between Ireland\, Scotland and Croatia. \n  \nSpeaker: Jean Bleakney\n\n\n \nJean Bleakney was born in Newry where her father was a Border Customs Officer. She studied Biochemistry at Queen’s University Belfast and has worked in medical research and horticulture. Her first three collections were published by Lagan Press. Here Selected Poems were issued by Templar Poetry in 2016 to coincide with the appearance of her work on the GCE Advanced Level syllabus in Northern Ireland. Her most recent collection is No Remedy (2017)\, also published by Templar Poetry \n  \nSpeaker: Moya Cannon\n\n\n \nMoya Cannon was born in Dunfanaghy\, Co Donegal and now lives in Dublin. She holds degrees in History and Politics and in International Relations from\, respectively\, University College\, Dublin and . Corpus Christi College\, Cambridge. She is the author of five collections of poetry\, most recently Keats Lives (Carcanet\, 2015). A sixth collection from Carcanet Press is forthcoming in 2019. She is a member of Aosdána. \n  \n \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Roy Foster Roy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914. \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Ronan McCrea\n\n\n \nA native of Dublin\, Ronan McCrea is Professor of Constitutional and European Law at University College London. He is also a member of the Bar of Ireland and the Bar of England and Wales. He was previously a ‘référendaire’ (judicial clerk) at the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg and was for ten years a visiting professor at the Central European University in Budapest. In addition to his academic work he practices law at 11 King’s Bench Walk Chambers in London and comments frequently on legal matters and EU affairs for RTÉ\, BBC\, Sky News and in publications such as The Irish Times\, The Irish Independent and The Financial Times. \n  \nSpeaker: Sir Richard Needham\n\n\n \nSir Richard Needham\, 6th Earl of Kilmorey\, Kt PC was a Member of Parliament from 1979 to 1997\, he served as Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992 and as Minister of State for Trade between 1992 and 1995. He served under Thatcher and later John Major as a Under-Secretary of State for Northern Ireland between 1985 and 1992 and under Major as Minister of State for Trade between 1992 and 1995\, and was instrumental in transforming Northern Ireland’s economic base and the UK’s export strategy under Michael Heseltine. He was the longest serving British government Northern Ireland minister. Needham’s book Honourable Member and Battling for Peace: Northern Ireland’s Longest-Serving British Minister (1999); is an account of his years in Northern Ireland and his contribution to peace. Needham holds an honorary degree of Doctor of laws from the University of Ulster. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1994 and knighted in 1997. \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-agreement-and-brexit/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading,research,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/belfast-and-BREXIT_bw.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190605T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20190319T153508Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190604T084909Z UID:11402-1559763000-1559766600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Essaying the Body: Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - 5 June DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine join the ILS to discuss their recent books of essays. Pine’s winning last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year seemed to mark a reemergence of the essay form in Irish literature. Perhaps the flourishing of literary journals in Ireland has encouraged this\, perhaps the renewed appreciation of Hubert Butler’s work has been an influence\, certainly his cosmopolitan sensibility is present in the recent creative non-fiction of Brian Dillon\, Kevin Breathnach\, Ian Maleney… \n\nI’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question\, each dilemma\, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone\, especially young women and men\, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.Martina Evans in the Irish Times on Notes to Self\n \n\nThe personal essays of Pine and Gleeson share the ambition of those authors\, yet move inward reflecting on their own bodily traumas and the politics of the female body in Ireland in the last 50 years. In its variously raw\, funny\, acute manner Pine’s vivid collection addresses addiction\, fertility\, feminism\, sexual violence and depression. The formal experimentation of Gleeson’s Constellations is startling\, throughout this intimate account of pain is illuminating of art and the wider world. \n\n\nBooks will be for sale after and the authors will be available to sign.\n\n\n \nChair: Dr Lara Feigel\n\n\n \nDr Feigel is a literary critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King’s College London. Her most recent book Free Woman is an investigation of freedom that’s part memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. It interweaves life and literature to think about motherhood\, sex\, madness and communism\, testing the gains and costs of living freely. At King’s she co-directs the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture and runs the Ivan Juritz Prize\, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms. She reviews regularly for various publications (most frequently the Guardian and the Observer). \n  \n\n \n \nSpeaker: Sinéad Gleeson\n\n\n \nSinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays\, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta\, Winter Papers and Gorse\, and a story of hers will appear in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short story anthologies\, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland\, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is working on a novel. \n  \n\n \nSpeaker: Dr Emilie Pine\n\n\n \nEmilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies\, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave\, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance\, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press\, 2019). Her first collection of personal essays\, Notes to Self\, was published by Tramp Press (2018). \n  \n\nImage above: Femme nue auprès d’une glace\, 1889 by Paul-Albert Besnard. Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art\, New York. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/essaying-the-body-sinead-gleeson-and-emilie-pine-5-june-2/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,feminism,history,interview,lecture,medical,politics,Reading,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/essaying-the-body.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20190319T153727Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190412T190927Z UID:11404-1555615800-1555621200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Country Girls\, a celebration - 18 April DESCRIPTION:I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home…\n\nSo begins Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. With the support of the Dublin: One City\, One Book festival we are bringing together a fascinating panel to discuss The Country Girls trilogy as it is being celebrated in Dublin as the chosen festival book. Quite clearly we are not in Dublin but we’re delighted to extend the consideration of O’Brien’s work to London\, a city pivotal to her writing career and the setting for the last part of the trilogy. The special edition of the trilogy produced for this celebration is published by Faber & Faber and is introduced by Eimear McBride. The trilogy changed the temperature of Irish literature in the 1960s and inspired generations of readers and writers. O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than domestic and sexual servitude\, emotional disaffection and intellectual abnegation\, was nothing short of revolutionary. Not only was O’Brien giving voice to the voiceless\, she was washing the nation’s dirty laundry in public\, laundry which has proved so dirty that\, more than 50 years later\, it is still proving in need of a rinse.Eimear McBride The passion\, artistry and courage of Edna O’Brien’s vision in these novels continue to resonate into the 21st century. In addition to readings and discussion our panel will consider the role of the city in the books\, how the romantic aspects of O’Brien’s work have coloured her reception and O’Brien’s influence on younger writers. Dublin One City One Book is a Dublin City Council initiative\, led by Dublin City Public Libraries\, \n  \n\nPresented in association with the Dublin: One City One Book: \n  \n\n \n \nChair: Dr Anne Goudsmit\n\n\n \nDr Anne Goudsmit left Ireland to study at Sussex University and at the Sorbonne before moving to London. Her early career was in Finance\, when she worked at Citibank and subsequently at ITV. Anne wrote her PhD thesis on Northern Irish fiction at St Mary’s University\, Twickenham\, where she was a visiting lecturer. She is a member of the Irish Literary Society. She recently became a member of the board at the Irish Cultural Centre where she convenes a monthly Book Club. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Helen Cullen\n\n\n\nHelen Cullen is an Irish writer living in London. She worked at RTÉ for seven years before moving to London in 2010. Her debut novel\, The Lost Letters of William Woolf was published by Penguin in July 2018. Helen is now writing full-time and working on her second novel. She is also a contributor to the Irish Times newspaper and Sunday Times Magazine. Helen holds an M.A. Theatre Studies from UCD and is currently completing an M.A. English Literature at Brunel University. She was nominated as Best Newcomer in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Dr Sinéad Mooney\n\n\n \nDr Sinéad Mooney is a graduate of University College Cork and the University of Oxford. She is currently a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University\, Leicester\, where she teaches Irish literature and creative writing. Her monograph\, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press) won the 2012 American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize\, and her chapter on Edna O’Brien appeared in the recent in A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature\, edited by Clíona O’Gallchóir and Heather Ingman. She is currently working on a study of Irish women’s modernism. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Paula McGrath\n\n\n \nPaula McGrath lives in Dublin. A History of Running Away is her second novel. Her first\, Generation\, was published in 2015. She has a background in English Literature and is currently an Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland) PhD scholar at the University of Limerick. She received an Arts Council literary bursary in 2016\, and was recently Irish Writers Centre Writer-in-Residence in St Mark’s English Church\, Florence. In another life she was a yoga teacher. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-country-girls-a-celebration-18-april/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,history,interview,politics,Reading,religion,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/country-girls-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190325T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190325T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20180724T141112Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190219T072740Z UID:10534-1553542200-1553545800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:25 March - Working Class Irish Literature DESCRIPTION:In the recent years of political and social turbulence in the UK\, state of the nation debates have become commonplace and discussion on the representation of working class lives in literature has become a hot topic. A clearer recognition is emerging that publishers must overcome barriers of class and social mobility with the same level of commitment that has developed to respond to inequities in relation to race\, disability and gender. A false notion persisted beyond the early years of the state that Ireland was a classless society\, but shared political struggles cannot erase huge differences of opportunity and wealth. Recent non-fiction books have made significant contributions to such debates across both countries (Chavs – the Demonization of the Working Class; Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class and the History of Irish Working-Class Writing) and helped to highlight the marginalisation of working class voices and\, conversely\, the rich and various history of working class writing. We are delighted to bring together two writers whose work has embraced their origins and created compelling fictions peopled by working class characters. \n‘…when I began writing I wanted to imitate my heroes\, to take ordinary\, everyday people and make them the centre of the story\, as James Joyce does in Dubliners\, or as Kevin Barry and Lisa McInerney do with their spot-on\, lyrical descriptions of small city lives today.’Kit de Waal in The Guardian\nThe poet\, publisher\, sometime factory hand and journalist Dermot Bolger has throughout his plays\, poems and novels chronicled the lives of those around him in his native housing estate of Finglas in Dublin. His work often puzzles over the sustained power of nationalist concepts of Irishness. Bolger’s will read from his latest novel An Ark of Light which features the remarkable Eva Fitzgerald who defies convention in 1950s Ireland by leaving a failed marriage to embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. It takes her from teeming Moroccan streets and being flour-bombed in radical marches in London.  \nWhen Kit de Waal was growing up in 1970s Birmingham\, no one like her – poor\, black and Irish – wrote books. After securing a book deal for her first novel My Name is Leon de Waal used some of her advance to set up a creative writing scholarship to try to improve working-class representation in the arts. Her most recent novel\, A Trick to Time\, features Mona\, a young Irish girl in the big city\, with the thrill of a new job and a room of her own in a busy boarding house. On her first night out in 1970s Birmingham\, she meets William\, a charming Irish boy with an easy smile and an open face. They embark upon a passionate affair\, a whirlwind marriage – before a sudden tragedy tears them apart.‘Pound for pound\, word for word\, I’d have Bolger represent us in any literary Olympics.’Colum McCann\nA signing of both books will be held after the talk. \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Kit de WaalKit de Waal\, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father\, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the 60’s and 70’s. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law\, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels. She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children\, and has written training manuals on adoption\, foster care and judgecraft for members of the judiciary. Her writing has received numerous awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller\, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award\, long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Her second novel The Trick to Time is an unforgettable tale of grief\, longing\, and a love that lasts a lifetime. \n\n\n \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Dermot Bolger\n\n\n\nBorn in Dublin in 1959\, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known writers. His fourteenth novel\, An Ark of Light (2018) follows titles such as The Journey Home\, Father’s Music\, The Valparaiso Voyage\, The Family on Paradise Pier\, A Second Life: A Renewed Novel\, New Town Soul  and the novella\, The Fall of Ireland. His first play\, The Lament for Arthur Cleary\, received the Samuel Beckett Award; his acclaimed Ballymun Trilogy of plays has been staged in several countries and in 2012 his stage adaption of James Joyce’s Ulysses was widely praised. A poet\, his ninth collection of poems\, The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss\, was published in 2017. Bolger writes for Ireland’s leading newspapers and in 2012 received the Commentator of the Year Award at the Irish Newspaper awards. \n\n\nChair: Dr Tony Murray \nTony Murray is Director of the Irish Writers in London Summer School and Curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain. Murray’s research is in literary and cultural representations of the Irish diaspora with a particular focus on the Irish in Britain. He is especially interested in the role of narrative in the construction and mediation of migrant identities. Publications include London Irish Fictions: Narrative Diaspora and Identity (2012) and Writing Irish Nurses in Britain (2018). URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/working-class-irish-writing/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Class,feminism,interview,lecture,politics,Reading,social history,tradition,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/working-class-lit-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190225T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190225T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20181231T142618Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190219T071945Z UID:11162-1551123000-1551128400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:25 Feb - The North\, Irish poetry special DESCRIPTION:The ILS is working with The North poetry journal for this event to launch their special Irish issue. Editors and poets Jane Clarke and Nessa O’Mahony lead a rich evening of readings and discussion of contemporary Irish poetry. From an issue bursting with ideas and innovation (120 poems by 107 poets) we are gathering some fascinating poets to illustrate the variety and quality of contemporary Irish writing: Siobhán Campbell\, Derek Coyle\, Nora Hughes\, Judy O’Kane (fresh from winning the Charles Causley International Poetry Prize) and Mary Noonan join our hosts. Apart from readings on the night we will be considering recent trends in form and subject\, ideas of Irishness\, poetry and the 20 years of fragile peace in Northern Ireland and\, inevitably\, Brexit. \nThe event is also our farewell to the poet Matthew Sweeney who died last August. Sweeney was a much loved figure on the London literary scene for many years. Ever prolific\, Sweeney published two new collections in his last year\, My Life As a Painter (Bloodaxe) and King of a Rainy Country (Arc) inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose. More work has appeared posthumously in the latest edition of Southword and three poems of Sweeney’s feature in this issue of The North\, we will include a reading.  \nThe widespread dismay amongst Irish writers in response to the gender imbalance of both poets and critics represented in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017)\, has led to a flowering of interest in the many overlooked Irish women poets from the seventeenth century to the present day. At this opportune moment we have asked Siobhán Campbell\, to contribute a reflection on the largely forgotten Irish poet Lola Ridge (1873-1941). \nA signing will follow the event.  \n\nChair: Jane Clarke\n\n\n \nJane Clarke grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure in Co. Wicklow. Her first collection\, The River (Bloodaxe Books\, 2015). She was awarded a literary bursary by the Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaíon in September 2017 for the completion of her second collection and her work on a sequence in response to a soldier’s letters from the Front during World War 1\, in collaboration with the Mary Evans Picture Library\, London. She now combines writing with her work as an independent consultant providing facilitation\, team building and leadership development to public service and not-for-profit organisations. \n\nChair: Nessa O’Mahony\n\n\n\nNessa O’Mahony is a Dublin-born poet and novelist. She has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk (1999)\, Trapping a Ghost (2005)\, In Sight of Home (2009) and Her Father’s Daughter (2014). She isand co-editor with Siobhán Campbell of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her first novel\, The Branchman (Arlen House\, 2018) was recently published. O’Mahony won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards.. \n\n\n\n  \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Siobhán Campbell\n\n\n\nSiobhán is a poet\, critic and lecturer. She is the author of six works of poetry and co-editor with Nessa O’Mahony of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her poetry has received awards in the National Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Competition and is the recipient of an Arts Council award and the Templar Poetry Prize. Much of Campbell’s work is expressive of her interest in the place of the political poem in contemporary poetics – her most recent volume Heat Signature (March\, 2017) reflects on commemoration and the centenary of the Dublin Rising while her Cross Talk (2010) explored boundaries and the interwoven nature of family\, local and historical conflicts. \n\n\n\n\n. \n \n\nSpeaker: Derek Coyle\n\n\nDerek Coyle has published poems in Irish Pages\, The Texas Literary Review\, The Honest Ulsterman\, Orbis\, Cuadrivio\, Skylight 47\, Assaracus\, and The Stony Thursday Book. He has been shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award (2010\, 2014\, 2015)\, and in 2012 he was a chosen poet for the Poetry Ireland ‘Introductions Series.’ In 2013 he was runner up in the Bradshaw Prize. He is a founding member of the Carlow Writers’ Co-Operative. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s.. \n \n\nSpeaker: Nora Hughes\n\n\nNora grew up in Belfast. She has lived in London since 1972 and worked in education for many years\, specialising in adult literacy. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies\, including Envoi\, Second Light\, The Interpreter’s House and The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press\, 2014). She is working towards a pamphlet collection. \n\n \n. \n\nSpeaker: Mary Noonan\n\n\n\nMary Noonan was born in London\, but grew up in Cork. Her debut collection of poems was The Fado House (Dublin\, Dedalus Press\, 2012). In 2007\, she was selected to take part in the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in Dublin and was invited to read at the Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin in 2009. The manuscript of The Fado House was awarded the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in June 2010. She works as a lecturer in French literature at University College Cork. \n \n\n \n\n \n\nSpeaker: Judy O’Kane\n\n\n\nJudy is a prose writer and poet. She worked the wine harvest in St Estèphe\, Bordeaux on sabbatical from legal partnership in Dublin and her work explores terroir\, wine’s sense of place. She has just been announced as the winner of the 2018 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. In 2017 she won the National Memory Day Prize and the Irish Post Prize\, and was prize winner at Wells Festival of Literature and Guernsey Literary Festival. In 2015 she won the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. Her poetry is published in The World of Fine Wine\, Landfall\, and The North: The Irish Issue. Thirst\, her non-fiction work-in-progress\, was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Award for best un-commissioned first biography. An extract\, The Drawing Room\, was published by the Manchester Review in December 2017. Judy holds an LL.B from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Life Writing from UEA\, where she is completing a PhD in Creative and Critical writing. She teaches advocacy at the Law Society of Dublin.\nTwitter @judeokane \n. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/25-feb-the-north-irish-poetry-special/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Collaboration,feminism,folklore,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/the-north-slider-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180521T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180521T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20171212T194151Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180829T131846Z UID:9914-1526931000-1526934600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Border Walk: Garrett Carr and Iain Sinclair - 21 May DESCRIPTION:First this three-hundred-mile line demarcated counties\, then countries and will next be the frontier of the European Union. As the uncertain agreements and ‘statements of intent’ are confirmed and disavowed by the UK and EU representatives over the Irish border we look at the topography of this line on the map and consider the human geography of borderlands. Cartographer\, artist and writer Garrett Carr has in his book The Rule of the Land told the story of Ireland’s border and a created a portrait of its landscape and people. Carr will join in conversation with the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair whose work is rooted in London and lately within the influences of psychogeography.“Garrett Carr engages a mapmaker’s eye and a writer’s sensibility to create a great book” The Irish Times.\n\nWe pass here into another allegiance\,\nexpect new postage stamps\, new prices\, manifestoes\,\nand brace ourselves for the change. But the landscape does not alter;\nwe had already entered these mountains an hour ago.\nFrom The Frontier\, by John Hewitt 1962\n\nBoth writers have explored borderlands and those neglected blanks on the map that hide so much of our past\, the disconnect between mapped boundaries and shared experience. Sinclair’s fascinating and haunting book London Orbital recounts the year he spent walking around the M25 – the motorway that encircles London. Carr’s The Rule of the Land explores a fragile borderland\, with an uncertain future. By foot or canoe he followed the border closely. At night he camped out on the land. He visited architecture on the border\, forts and dykes as well as defensive buildings of the Troubles. His engagements those living on the frontier\, bring us the lived experience of the line on the map.\n‘Here in this brilliant\, crackling series of final walks through the London landscape\, he finds the dissolving identity of the city increasingly disconcerting.’ Review of The Last London in The Observer.\n\n\nSpeaker: Garrett Carr\n\nGarrett Carr was born in Donegal in 1975. He has previously published three Young Adult novels. A lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University\, he lives in Belfast with his family. His research interests include writing about place\, history and memoir. He is also a map-maker and publishs academically on the topic of cartography. He holds an MA in Art History\, an MPhil in Geography and a PhD in Creative Writing. In his exhibition Mapping Alternative Ulster he brought together diverse mapmakers: local historians\, activists\, artists\, geographers and urban planners for a show of maps. See his website here: http://www.garrettcarr.net/\n\n\nSpeaker: Iain Sinclair\n\nIain Sinclair is the award-winning writer of numerous critically acclaimed books on London\, including Lights Out for the Territory\, London Orbital and London Overground. The son of a Welsh GP\, Sinclair studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published\, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past. He won the Encore Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Downriver. Sinclair has been documenting the peculiar magic of the river-city that absorbs and obsesses him for most of his adult life. He lives in Hackney\, East London. In his most recent book\, The Last London (2017)\, he strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. See his website here: http://www.iainsinclair.org.uk/\n\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/border-walk-garrett-carr-and-iain-sinclair-21-may/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,cycling,history,interview,nature,Reading,social history,walking ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/border-walking.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180326T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180326T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20171207T225547Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180118T000617Z UID:9879-1522092600-1522096200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Dervla Murphy - 26 March DESCRIPTION:Dervla Murphy is Ireland’s most prolific travel writer who for five decades has travelled the world mostly alone\, and mostly by bicycle. A fiercely independent woman who turned her back on societal conventions at a time when few were as brave\, she observed and recorded the world with wonder and curiosity\, and an astute political sensibility. Few have ever explored the world on two wheels as has Dervla Murphy\, she joins us to reflect on her literary work and the great journeys she has undertaken. \n‘An extraordinary book\, reflecting an extraordinary woman and one of the great travellers of our time.’William Trevor\, on Wheels Within Wheels in The Times \nMurphy’s extraordinary autobiography\, Wheels Within Wheels\, documents her travelling life since 1963\, tracing the her route from Ireland to India by bike\, via Afghanistan. Her last journey was to Palestine and is recounted in Between River and Sea: Encounters in Israel and Palestine. Before that there have been some 20 other books\, about journeys that have taken her all over the world\, from Peru to Pakistan\, from Africa\, India and Siberia to Cuba\, Romania and Laos. \nIn all her journeys\, she has biked\, walked or simply improvised her way through countries when bikes broke down or were stolen\, or her own limbs proved temporarily untrustworthy. Only weeks into her first journey in 1963\, she shot a wolf that threatened attack in rural Yugoslavia by using a gun she had acquired and learnt to use in Ireland\, with the support of helpful\, if astounded\, Lismore gardaí. Nothing thereafter\, including increasing age\, ever appears to have daunted her. Murphy will join Dorothy Allen in conversation. \n\nSpeaker: Dervla Murphy\n\nDervla Murphy was born on 28 November 1931 of parents whose families were both settled in Dublin as far back as can be traced. Her grandfather and most of his family were involved in the Irish Republican movement. Her father was appointed Waterford County Librarian in 1930 after three years internment in Wormwood Scrubs prison and seven years at the Sorbonne. Her mother was invalided by arthritis when Dervla was one year old. She was educated at the Ursuline Convent in Waterford until she was fourteen\, when\, because of the wartime shortage of servants\, she left to keep house for her father and to nurse her mother. Dervla did this for sixteen years with occasional breaks bicycling on the Continent. Her mother’s death left her free to go farther afield and in 1963 she cycled to India. There she worked with Tibetan refugee children before returning home after a year to write her first two books. \nDervla Murphy’s first book\, Full Tilt: Ireland to India with a Bicycle\, was published in 1965. Over 20 other titles have followed. Dervla has won worldwide praise for her writing and has been described as a ‘travel legend’ and ‘the first lady of Irish cycling’. Now in her 80s\, she continues to travel around the world and remains passionate about politics\, conservation\, bicycling and beer. Dervla is now published by Eland. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/dervla-murphy-26-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,cycling,feminism,history,interview,social history,travel,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/dervla_murphy_slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180219T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180219T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 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:20260526T071424 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 ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/doyle-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171127T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171127T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 CREATED:20170812T121644Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T220522Z UID:9350-1511811000-1511816400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Eimear McBride - 27 Nov DESCRIPTION:Eimear McBride joins the Irish Literary Society to discuss and read from her work. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a writer of remarkable power and originality\,’ McBride’s debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing received the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize\, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her short stories have appeared in Dubliners 100\, The Long Gaze Back and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She writes and reviews for the The Guardian\, New Statesman and the TLS.\n“Blazingly daring…[McBride’s] prose is a visceral throb\, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words\, freed from the tedious march of sequence\, seem to want to merge with one another\, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling\, and also thrillingly efficient. The language plunges us into the centre of experiences that are often raw\, unpleasant\, frightening\, but also vital.”James Wood\, The New Yorker\nHer most recent novel\, The Lesser Bohemians\, follows a young Irish woman who arrives in London from Ireland in the 1990s\, to study drama and falls passionately\, dangerously in love with an older actor. The older man has a disturbing past for which the young girl is unprepared and her troubled past becomes apparent. A bold and subversive story about sexual passion\, The Lesser Bohemians is also a celebration of love\, and how it can both destroy and create. McBride will be in conversation with Shevaun Wilder. \nSpeaker: Eimear McBride\n \nEimear McBride was born in 1976 in Liverpool to Northern Irish parents. Aged two she and her family returned to Ireland and her childhood was mostly spent in Tubbercurry\, Co. Sligo. At fourteen they moved again to Castlebar\, Co Mayo. In 1994\, at seventeen\, she went to London and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre. Much of her twenties were spent temping and travelling. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. It won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize\, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014. She moved to Cork in 2006\, and Norwich in 2011\, where she currently lives with her husband and daughter. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/eimear-mcbride-27-nov/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:exile,interview,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Eimear-McBride-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171114T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171114T200000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071424 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 \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 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171030T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171030T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071425 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 ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/gay-lives_3.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170925T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170925T193000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071425 CREATED:20170901T131049Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180117T005253Z UID:9428-1506367800-1506367800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Caldwell and Hayden - 25 Sept DESCRIPTION:June Caldwell and David Hayden visit the ILS to discuss their latest volumes of short stories and the short story form. \nFrom one of Ireland’s most grindingly authentic and radically original talents\, Caldwell’s Room Little Darker explores the clandestine aspects of modern life through jagged\, visceral tales of wanton sex\, broken relationships\, homelessness and futuristic nightmares. \nCaldwell’s modernist style and tendency to switch forms never let the reader rest. Each of her stories announces itself with a bang. The outrageous ideas for the most part have a realistic undertone\, grounding Room Little Darker in a world that is oddly\, awfully\, familiar.Sarah Gilmartin\, The Irish Times \nCaldwell’s modernist style and tendency to switch forms never let the reader rest. Each of her stories announces itself with a bang. The outrageous ideas for the most part have a realistic undertone\, grounding Room Little Darker in a world that is oddly\, awfully\, familiar. An abusive father haunts his daughter and wife from the confines of a nursing home; a couple with an appetite for kink discover their escapades have led them into something unimaginably grim; an addict makes his way around a city centre crackling with menace; an unborn child narrates her own tragic story; a paedophile acquires a sex therapy robot and wonders how they’ll get along. At once hilarious and profoundly moving\, June Caldwell’s stories probe raw sexuality and disturbing psychology\, the love (and hate) of family\, the darkness and light that lives inside us all. \n“It’s an open secret that David Hayden is one of the most interesting short story writers around. Why it’s taken this long for his first collection to be published is beyond me but I\, along with anyone with even the vaguest interest in looking at modernism anew\, will be queuing up for a copy.” Eimear McBride \nThe stories in David Hayden’s Darker With The Lights On are driven ceaselessly\, hypnotically forward by a powerful narrative force\, the stories in this debut collection pull off that rare trick of captivating the reader\, while twisting the form into truly new shapes. Comprising compelling stories made memorable by an imagist’s flair for photographic observation and unsettling\, often startling\, emotional landscapes\, Darker With the Lights On introduces a new and brilliant talent. \nSpeakers:\n\nJune Caldwell\nJune Caldwell worked for many years as a journalist before writing fiction. Her story ‘SOMAT’ was published in the award-winning anthology The Long Gaze Back\, edited by Sinéad Gleeson and was chosen as a ‘favourite’ by The Sunday Times. She is a prizewinner of the Moth International Short Story Prize and has been shortlisted for many others\, including the Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction\, the Colm Toíbín International Short Story Award\, the Lorian Hemingway Prize\, and the Sunday Business Post/Penguin Ireland Short Story Prize. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Queen’s University Belfast\, and lives in Dublin.\n\nDavid Hayden\nDavid Hayden’s writing has appeared in gorse\, The Yellow Nib\, The Moth\, The Stinging Fly\, Spolia and The Warwick Review\, and poetry in PN Review. He was shortlisted for the 25th RTÉ Francis MacManus Short Story prize. Born in Dublin\, he has lived in the US and Australia and is now based in Norwich\, UK\, where he is currently working on a novel. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/caldwell-and-hayden-25-sept/ LOCATION:Dr Williams’s Library\, 14 Gordon Square\, Bloomsbury\, London\, WC1H 0AR\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,short story ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/short-story.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170921T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170921T200000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071425 CREATED:20170812T103942Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180128T230003Z UID:9342-1506016800-1506024000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:William Trevor - 21 Sept DESCRIPTION:EMBASSY OF IRELAND event – The Embassy of Ireland has kindly reserved a number of tickets for Irish Literary Society members for its celebration of the life and work of William Trevor. Please contact the Hon. Secretary for further details. \nThe Ambassador of Ireland Mr. Adrian O’Neill\, the Trevor family and Viking Books host an evening to celebrate the life and work of William Trevor KBE at the Embassy of Ireland. The evening will feature the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li and the great cellist Steven Isserlis\, both friends and admirers of the late author. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/william-trevor-21-sept/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:biography,interview,Reading,short story,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/william-trevor-slider-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170712T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170712T200000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071425 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 END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170626T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071425 CREATED:20170418T182200Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T225429Z UID:9088-1498505400-1498510800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Eavan Boland - 26 June 2017 DESCRIPTION:Widely considered to be one of Ireland’s most important contemporary poets\, Eavan Boland is currently a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Stanford University\, where she has taught since 1996. In 2015 a New Collected Poems was published\, and Eavan Boland: Inside History\, a book celebrating her long and distinguished career\, was recently published by Arlen House\, its editor will join in conversation with Boland. In January 2017 Boland was appointed editor of Poetry Ireland Review.\nPoetry has been an integral part of Eavan Boland’s life since she was a young girl. In college she wrote her first publication\, 23 Poems. She has gone on to publish nearly 20 books of poetry\, winning awards and accolades from readers and critics alike. Boland\, a self-described “woman poet\,” has always had trouble reconciling those two words. “It was like there was a magnetic opposition between the two concepts\,” she said. “The woman coming from the collective sense of nurture in Ireland\, and the poet coming from the much more individualist\, creative realm.” Mary Robinson quoted Eavan Boland’s poetry during her inaugural speech as President of Ireland in Dublin Castle on 3 December 1990\, and on 15 March 2016 President Obama quoted lines from her poem “On a Thirtieth Anniversary” (from Against Love Poetry) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. \nBoland’s is a fascinating career which develops from her early attachment to Yeats\, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing\, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath\, Elizabeth Bishop\, and Adrienne Rich\, and her lucid\, critical engagement through poetry and prose with Ireland’s poetic tradition. \nThis event was formerly advertised as the ILS Annual Dinner\, the dinner part of the evening has now been cancelled. \nGuest of Honour: Eavan Boland\n \nBoland\, the youngest of five children\, was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat\, her mother\, Frances Kelly\, an artist. The family moved to London when Boland was six and she went to school there until 1956. Her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951 recalls her sense of otherness at this early age: \n…the teacher in the London convent who\,\nwhen I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom\nturned and said — “You’re not in Ireland now.” \nDuring her father’s next posting\, from 1956 until 1960\, the family lived in New York. Boland returned to Dublin and to boarding school at the Convent of the Holy Child in Killiney when she was fifteen. At Trinity College she studied Latin and English and graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1966. She lectured in Trinity 1967-1968 and then resigned to devote her time to writing. She wrote poems as a child and had published poems in the Irish Times while still an undergraduate. She published her first collection\, New Territory\, in 1967\, when she was twenty-two. During the 1970s she gave writing workshops throughout Ireland and in 1980 she co-founded Arlen House\, an Irish feminist press. \nFor Boland\, what she calls ‘the placelessness of her childhood’ and ‘her emphatic sense of living in a suburb in her own home’ were important influences on her work. In 1969\, in her mid-twenties\, she married the novelist Kevin Casey. They moved to a house in the Dublin suburbs in the early 1970s and have two daughters. A grandchild was born in 2014. She has written of motherhood and suburban life and according to Declan Kiberd ‘She is one of the very few Irish poets to describe with any fidelity the lives now lived by half a million people in the suburbs of Dublin.’ \nSince 1996\, Boland spends the academic year at Stanford College\, Palo Alto\, California\, where she is a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme\, but she calls Dundrum home. Speaking in 1988\, Boland said of herself: ‘I see myself as an Irish poet\, I think it’s important that Irish poets have a discourse with the idea of Irishness\, and I think it’s probably very important that an Irish woman poet doesn’t shirk that discourse because there have been gaps\, vacancies or silences in literature’. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/annual-dinner-eavan-boland-26-june-2017/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:America,art,biography,book signing,exile,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/eavan-boland3-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170522T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170522T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T071425 CREATED:20170228T211301Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230150Z UID:9033-1495481400-1495485000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Donal Ryan - 22 May DESCRIPTION:The novelist Donal Ryan joins Dorothy Allen to discuss his latest novel\, All We Shall Know. Ryan’s award-winning debut\, The Spinning Heart\, was published to great acclaim in 2012: it won the Guardian First Book Award\, the European Union Prize for Literature\, and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. The Thing About December and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun followed soon after. All We Shall Know is a tragic and vivid tale which confirms Ryan as an acute chronicler of the disaffection at the heart of present-day Ireland. \nAll We Shall Know tells the story of Melody Shee. At 33 years-old\, she finds herself pregnant with the child of a 17 year-old Traveller boy\, Martin Toppy\, and not by her husband Pat. Melody was teaching Martin to read\, but now he’s gone\, and Pat leaves too\, full of rage. She’s trying to stay in the moment\, but the future is looming\, while the past won’t let her go. It’s a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a bold young Traveller woman\, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody’s life. \nFollowing the nine months of her pregnancy\, All We Shall Know unfolds with emotional immediacy in Melody’s fierce\, funny\, and unforgettable voice\, as she contends with her choices\, past and present. Without disclosing the details of this final scene\, it does not seem extravagant to claim it is worthy of Greek drama. That the tragedies of our own age happen in suburban semis\, or on Travellers’ sites\, does not make them any less cathartic – and Ryan’s choice of narrator\, a character both deeply flawed and painfully guilty\, shows him working in the great tradition of tragic fiction\, his lonely adulteress coming to grief in the same shadowy spaces as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.The Guardian \n‘Martin Toppy is the son of a famous Traveller and the father of my unborn child. He’s seventeen\, I’m thirty-three. I was his teacher. I’d have killed myself by now if I was brave enough. I don’t think it would hurt the baby. His little heart would stop with mine. He wouldn’t feel himself leaving one world of darkness for another\, his spirit untangling itself from me.’ \nSpeaker:\n\nDonal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. His first two novels\, The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December\, and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun\, have all been published to major acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award\, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland)\, and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Thing About December was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards\, and the title story of A Slanting of the Sun won the writing.ie Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Donal holds a Writing Fellowship at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/donal-ryan-22-may/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,novel,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ryan2_slider.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR