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 ...
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 ...
For the first ILS lecture of 2015 Joseph Horgan discusses his book, The Song at Your Backdoor, and recites poems from his prize-winning collections. In The Song at Your Backdoor he sets out to follow Patrick Kavanagh’s maxim that ‘all great civilisations are based on parochialism. To know fully even one field or one land is a lifetime’s experience.’ The ...
