BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Irish Literary Society - ECPv6.16.2//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-WR-CALNAME:Irish Literary Society 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:20140101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20250124T200000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20250124T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20250104T175925Z LAST-MODIFIED:20250211T051913Z UID:20708-1737748800-1737752400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Ó Rathaille - 24 Jan DESCRIPTION:Join us on Friday 24 Jan for our first event of 2025. We are delighted to welcome back Professor Declan Kiberd to the Society to discuss the life and poetry of Aogán Ó Rathaille (c.1670–1729) and to launch a book by long time ILS member Brian O’Connor of a selection of the poems. Conveying Ó Rathaille’s intricate rhythms and rhyme schemes are a challenge for a translator\, even more so in his great laments of dispossession\, O’Connor carries the work into English with admirable simplicity and fluency. \n\nThese translations capture the fragile buoyancy of beautifully extended vowels\, which give each line a magnificent dignified internal patterning\, even as their endings sometimes refuse rhyme\, because the world the poet faces is no longer felt to be regular: Brian O’Connor helps us also to appreciate the sheer range of Ó Rathaille’s acoustic.Declan Kiberd\n\nThe evening will feature Professor Kiberd’s discussion of the work of Ó Rathaille and the closing down of the civilisation that nurtured him. There will be music and readings from the Irish and English. In O’Connor’s new book of translations\, Wave\, the Irish and English are presented in parallel text – this will be available for sale on the night. The parallel text format of the publication is suited to enhancing language acquisition and effectively scaffolding reading proficiency\, as such we have made this event free to encourage all those studying Irish to attend. Reserve tickets below. After the event you can purchase a copy from the publisher\, Eile.\n\n\n\n Speakers: Declan Kiberd\n\n\n\n Declan Kiberd\nDeclan Kiberd teaches in the English Department and Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish Studies as the Donald and Marilyn Keough Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English. A leading international authority on the literature of Ireland\, both in English and Irish\, Kiberd has authored scores of articles and many books\, including Synge and the Irish Language\, Men and Feminism in Irish Literature\, Irish Classics\, The Irish Writer and the World\, Inventing Ireland\, and\, most recently\, Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Life in Joyce’s Masterpiece (2009). He has co-edited with PJ Mathews Handbook of the Irish Revival 1891-1922\, a five-hundred-page anthology of cultural and political writings with commentaries and introductions\, published by Abbey Theatre Press in June 2015.. \n\nBrian O'Connor\n Brian O’Connor\nBrian O’Connor has been a member of the Irish Literary Society for many years. He was born in Cork\, graduated from UCC and worked as a journalist and researcher. His selection of translations from Ó Rathaille is published by Eile Press and will be available for sale at the event. \n[/content_band]\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/orathaille-24-jan/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Irish language,lecture,London-Irish,music,poetry,politics,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/wave-banner1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20231027T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20231027T190000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20231008T154152Z LAST-MODIFIED:20231008T163202Z UID:20012-1698433200-1698433200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Poetry as Commemoration showcase DESCRIPTION:Last year we engaged with Poetry Ireland and the Poetry as Commemoration project in UCD to develop workshops which used poetry as a means to deepen our collective understanding of Ireland’s past and to explore a challenging period of history relating to the War of Independence and Civil War. The three workshops were delivered by Roisin Tierney and Ian Duhig who developed the work of poet members of the Society\, this event provides a stage for those poets to deliver their work. \nWe hope we’ll have a good showing from members to support our poets in the beautiful setting of the Fitzrovia Chapel. This is a free event open to all. c70 mins running time\, a drinks reception will follow. \nThe workshops to develop our poets’ work were sponsored by: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/poetry-as-commemoration-showcase/ LOCATION:Fitzrovia Chapel\, Fitzroy Place\, 2 Pearson Square\, London W1T 3BF\, London\, Fitzrovia Chapel\, Fitzroy Place\, 2 PeW1T 3BF\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,history,London-Irish,Nationalism,poetry,politics,Reading,social history,violence ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/POETRY-COMM-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20231003T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20231003T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20230905T115055Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230907T214421Z UID:19739-1696361400-1696366800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Heaney and the Classics DESCRIPTION:Ten years ago in September 2013\, Michael Parker led an event for the Irish Literary Society to celebrate the life and work of Seamus Heaney\, our then President\, whose passing on 30 August 2013 was such a loss to family\, friends and his many admirers. We now mark the 10th anniversary of his passing with an event to reflect on Heaney’s engagement with classical literature. Heaney explained the role of the classical world in his work by observing that ‘consciousness needs coordinates\, we need ways of locating ourselves in cultural as well as geographical space’. We are delighted to welcome Esther Armstrong\, Stephen Harrison\, Catherine Heaney\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, and Michael Parker to speak on this theme. \nA major factor in Heaney’s turn towards classical texts from around 1983 onwards was his friendship with one of Harvard’s great classicists\, Robert Fitzgerald. Three years before Heaney’s initial Harvard appointment\, Fitzgerald published ‘Seamus Heaney: An Appreciation’\, to accompany a selection of his poetry in an issue of The New Republic (174:13\, 27 March 1976). A high proportion of the material you will be presented with tonight is hard-hitting\, not surprisingly given the appalling nature of the violence that had dominated his life and that of the people of Northern Ireland over three decades. \nVirgil had his River Mincius\, I have my River Moyola. Virgil moved from his father’s farm in the North to a poet’s retreat outside Naples in the South\, I made [a] similar move from Ulster to Wicklow to Dublin. Virgil lived through civil war in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination. I have experienced not only the civic violence of Ulster\, but thanks to the age of technology\, I have witnessed civil wars and ethnic conflicts all over the globe\, blanket bombing and terrorist attacks.Seamus Heaney\, ‘Towers\, Trees\, Terrors: A reverie in Urbino’\, in Gabriella Morisco (ed)\, URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/heaney-and-the-classics/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Classics,folklore,Latin,poetry ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/09/heaney-and-the-classics-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20221017T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20221017T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20220903T182915Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230406T162309Z UID:19328-1666035000-1666040400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Bandit Country\, James Conor Patterson - 17 October DESCRIPTION:​Joining us at the start of the ILS 2022-23 season are the poet James Conor Patterson and writer Darran Anderson to launch Patterson’s book bandit country. \n\n\nbandit country is the much-anticipated debut collection from James Conor Patterson\, who will be familiar to ILS regulars from our event last year launching his anthology of essays on the Irish border: The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border. \nbandit country is a rollicking\, hyper-literate and at times deeply troubling account of a young man’s navigation of the semi-lawless borderlands between the north of Ireland and the Republic – the ‘bandit country’ of the Troubles – and the criss-crossed sea border to England and beyond. Patterson shows us how the militarised boundary line of old has morphed into an invisible and semi-wild frontier\, where the ghosts of a thirty-year war continue to haunt the ‘ceasefire generation’.Patterson writes in a hybrid dialect of Newry street and Scots and Irish-inflected English – and in a virtuosic variety of forms: these poems crackle with vernacular wit and the rhythms of everyday speech\, absorbing the influence of the poet’s Belfast mentor\, Ciaran Carson\, and the radical poetics of Tom Leonard. Already a rising star and Eric Gregory award-winner\, James Conor Patterson is an extraordinary talent at the forefront of a new wave of poets exploring the linguistic inheritance of region and community. Pattterson will be reading from his work and joined in conversation by the writer Darran Anderson. \n\n\nFor this Newry to be believable\, it had to be rendered in language native to it. Not the received pronunciation of the Coloniser\, nor the Gaelic tongue stolen from our ancestors\, but a dialect specific to the borderlands of South Down\, South Armagh and North Louth. A language that self-consciously aped the history of the area in a dirty mélange of English\, Irish\, Ulster Scots and Shelta. Newry is a place where people drop their g’s\, where you’re more likely to be bitten by a cleg than a horsefly\, and where swear words punctuate even the friendliest of sentences. Writing about it wouldn’t be hard—it was the way I’d heard people speak all my life—but what I learned from the likes of Tom Leonard and James Kelman was the dignity in it. A kind of punchy survivalism that even the most ‘civilising’ aspect of colonialism couldn’t squash. — James Conor Patterson\, article for RTE. \n\n\n  \n  \nBandit Country by James Conor Patterson. Published by Picador (September\, 2022) \n\n\n\n  \n  \n  \n Speakers and performers: James 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\nDarran Anderson\n\n\n\n Darran Anderson\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. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/bandit-country-james-conor-patterson-17-october/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,London-Irish,poetry,politics,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/bandit-country.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220228T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20220128T200452Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220222T151730Z UID:18798-1646076600-1646082000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Kinsella\, a celebration - 28 Feb DESCRIPTION:2021 saw the passing of the brothers Thomas (1928-2021) and John Kinsella (1932-2021). Our event will look back over their careers as poet and composer and include music and readings. \nThomas is credited with bringing the techniques of international modernism to Irish verse. He published his first collection\, The Starlight Eye (1952)\, with Dolmen Press\, helping to set the type himself. He translated extensively from Irish\, most notably the Old Irish epic An Táin Bó Cuailgne\, published as An Táin (1969) and An Duanaire—Poems of the Dispossessed (1981). In 1972\, he founded the Peppercanister Press to publish Butcher’s Dozen. The pamphlet poem was written in the immediate aftermath of Bloody Sunday\, following the Widgery report which whitewashed the atrocities\, and published on 26 April 1972.His awards include two Guggenheim Fellowships and the Denis Devlin Memorial Award (1966\, 1969\, 1992). He taught in the US for many years and initiated and administered the Irish Tradition study program in Dublin until 1992. He long lived in County Wicklow\, Ireland\, but spent recent years living in Philadelphia. He passed away in Dublin in December of 2021. \nJohn composed both choral and vocal works\, his primary interest was in instrumental music\, and his most distinguished work is to be found in his string quartets\, concertos and particularly his symphonies. He was Ireland’s most prolific symphonist during the twentieth century. \nJoining us to read and discuss the poetry of Thomas Kinsella are Bernard O’Donoghue\, Martina Evans\, John Mcauliffe\, James Conor Patterson\, Derval Turbidy – further speakers to be announced. David Daly will play from John Kinsella’s compositions for Double Bass and talk about working with John and his place in the life of classical music in Ireland. The evening will also comprise a full reading of Thomas Kinsella’s 1972 poem ‘Butcher’s Dozen’ – the reissue by Carcanet will be launched on the night.\n\nPlaces are reserved for paid-up members of the Society\, tickets are available to purchase for £10 below for all others.\nIMAGE CREDIT: Image from The Táin. ‘Army massing’ by Louis le Brocquy. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/kinsella-a-celebration-28-feb/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,biography,Border,history,Irish language,music,musicology,poetry ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Kinsella_slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211025T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211025T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20211014T104732Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211018T120253Z UID:18417-1635190200-1635195600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Gail McConnell and Stephen Sexton - 25 October DESCRIPTION:  \n\n\n\nTo kick off the 2021 ILS season and welcome everyone back to physically present meetings we are delighted to be at the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith to give a London launch to two new poetry volumes from Stephen Sexton and Gail McConnell. We’ll also be featuring the Irish Poets in the UK edition of the Agenda poetry magazine with a reading from John O’Donoghue. \nGail McConnell joins us to read from her new collection The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins\, 2021). Her book pieces through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of her father\, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Flitting between a child and adult self\, this startling\, innovative debut charts the experience of going through the box\, as the poems attempt to decode the past and present\, and piece together a history\, and a life. Our President\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, comments: ‘She is now one of the crucial public writers.’  \n\n‘The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant\, from Wendy Houses\, to the very hairs of your head\, to the poetry of First Aid instructions\, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking — sometimes pain-making work — making the words fit the columns\, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book\, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses.’ CIARAN CARSON \n\n   \n\nHis pen is fantastical. Cheryl (of the title)\, tarot card clairvoyant\, is conjured out of thin air. She flourishes alongside many other sleights of hand and vanishing acts: there is no knot Sexton cannot slip… many of his phrases are so good I wanted to steal them…Sexton makes the world bearable with poetry as his intercessor. KATE KELLAWAY\, The Observer. \n\n\nStephen Sexton joins us to read from his new collection Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin\, 2021). It is the decade of centuries\, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo\, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley\, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive\, playful\, dream-like poems\, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present\, while Cheryl translates from the future\, showing us how we exist in all three at once. Reckoning with both public and private tragedies\, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One\, the poems range across old Europe: ‘Edelweiss’ and Titanic setting sail\, to a transatlantic\, cross-century symposium in Part Two\, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through\, it’s practically always the anniversary of something terrible\, but there’s always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards. A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear\, Cheryl’s Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize for Best First Collection-winning If All the World and Love Were Young\, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today. \n\n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n\nSpeaker: Gail McConnell\n\n\n \nGail McConnell is a writer and critic from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears\, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press\, 2018). A programme based on Fothermather was produced by Conor Garrett for Radio 4 in 2020 and made available as a Seriously… podcast. Gail’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review\, PN Review\, Virginia Quarterly Review\, Blackbox Manifold and Stand\, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave\, 2014). Gail’s writing interests include violence\, creatureliness\, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. \nSpeaker: Stephen Sexton\n\n\n \nStephen Sexton’s first book\, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University\, Belfast. \n \nSpeaker: John O’Donoghue\n\n\n \nJohn O’Donoghue is the author of a memoir Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray 2009) which was awarded Mind Book Of The Year in 2010. His poetry collections include Letter To Lord Rochester (Waterloo Press\, 2004); The Beach Generation (Pighog Press\, 2007); and Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press\, 2009). John lives in Brighton and teaches Creative Writing. He will be reading from his work in the ‘Irish Poets in the UK’ edition of Agenda. \nChair: James Conor Patterson\n\n\n \nJames Conor Patterson is the editor of the upcoming anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021) which will be the focus of our 15 November event. 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. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/gail-mcconnell-and-stephen-sexton-25-october/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Belfast,biography,book signing,crime,documentary,poetry,politics,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/mcconnel-sexton-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20210624T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20210624T193000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20210616T215934Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210616T233735Z UID:18272-1624563000-1624563000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:A History of Irish Women's Poetry - 24 June DESCRIPTION:Join us to celebrate the launch of a new collection of essays reflecting on the history of Irish women’s poetry with the editors Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. The new Cambridge University Press volume offers a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women’s poetry from earliest times to the present day. Joining the editors will be the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\, one of the major Irish poets writing over the past 50 years\, and the author of the chapter on her work\, the academic Maria Johnston. \n\nThe editors\, both literary scholars and award-winning poets in their own right\, will discuss their shaping the volume and its reading of Irish women’s poetry through many prisms – mythology\, gender\, history\, the nation – and most importantly\, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures\, such as Maire Mhac an tSaoi\, Eavan Boland\, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain\, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered\, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women’s poetry has been produced and received\, from the anonymous work of the early modern period\, through the bardic age\, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland\, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland\, the Irish Literary Revival\, and the advent of modernity. The volume and our event seeks to give an answer to the question posed by Ní Chuilleanáin in an essay on Speranza from 2000: ‘what use our female predecessors are to us as writers\, what is the function of model\, teacher\, exemplar?’ \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\n\n\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson\, she was a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week. \n\nSpeaker: Ailbhe Darcy\n\n\n \nDr Ailbhe Darcy’s most recent collection of poetry is Insistence\, published in June 2018 with Bloodaxe Books\, which won Wales Book of the Year and the Piggott Prize for Poetry in association with Listowel Writers’ Week. Her previous collection with Bloodaxe are Imaginary Menagerie (2011). A poetic text in collaboration with S.J. Fowler\, Subcritical Tests (2017)\, published by Gorse Editions\, and a chapbook\, A Fictional Dress (2009)\, published by Tall Lighthouse. In February 2020 she presented Alphabet on BBC Radio 4\, a programme about Inger Christensen’s extraordinary poem alfabet and its resonance in the age of climate change\, produced by Megan Jones. Darcy is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University. \n\nSpeaker: Maria Johnston\n\n\n \nDr. Maria Johnston received her Doctorate in English Literature in 2007 and has since worked as a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin\, the Mater Dei Institute (DCU) and Oxford University. She is a well-known poetry critic and her reviews and essays have appeared in a range of publications including the Guardian\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Edinburgh Review\, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. She is the co-editor of Reading Pearse Hutchinson (Irish Academic Press\, 2011) and is currently working on a book on contemporary Irish poetry. Her recent archival discoveries on the poet Ethna McCarthy were featured in the Irish Times.\n\n\nSpeaker: David Wheatley\n Wheatley is a poet and critic whose most recent poetry collection is The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet/Wake Forest UP\, 2017). He has published four previous collections with Gallery Press: Thirst (1997; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature)\, Misery Hill (2000)\, Mocker (2006)\, and A Nest on the Waves (2010). Wheatley’s critical work has appeared in numerous edited collections\, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012)\, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013)\, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). He was a founding editor of the poetry journal Metre\, and has written on poetry for a variety of other journals. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/a-history-of-irish-womens-poetry-24-june/ CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,Irish language,poetry,publishing,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/banner-crowdcast-Irish-women.png LOCATION:https://www.crowdcast.io/e/a-history-of-irish-womens-poetry END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20210201T210000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20210201T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20210201T203041Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210201T224044Z UID:18124-1612213200-1612213200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Days of Clear Light - 1 Feb 2021 DESCRIPTION:We are delighted to join with our friends to mark the occasion of 40 years of Salmon Poetry and to celebrate the work of Jessie Lendennie. To mark that achievement 100 writers have come together in contributing to a special Festschrift presented as a complete surprise to Jessie at Christmas 2020. Editor Nessa O’Mahony interviews Jessie for the ILS and a number of the poets have contributed recordings of their poems for this online celebration. \n\nThe marvellous Festschrift\, so assiduously shaped in secret by our friends the editors Alan Hayes and Nessa O’Mahony\, gathers together poetry\, prose and memoir\, full of love\, gratitude and acknowledgement of the central role Jessie and Salmon have played in Irish literature. The President of Ireland Michael D Higgins writes in the foreward of Salmon publishing his first volume of poetry\, The Betrayal back in 1990 and notes of Jessie’s grá for experimentalism: ‘For Jessie\, the world of publishing has always been a space of offering new possibilities and exciting opportunities. In exercising choice on what to publish she has been unafraid to take a risk\, to follow her heart and her instinct down roads untravelled. In doing so she has also brought many readers down new pathways\, introducing them to remarkable writers who may have remained undiscovered or ‘off the beaten track’ if it were not for Jessie.’ Alan Hayes in his introduction writes of the transformative effect of Salmon’s redress of the gender imbalance in Irish publishing\, his work at Arlen House also deserves great credit in publishing and reviving Irish women poets. The quality of the collections which stream from Salmon today stand up to the great work of Eva Bourke and Rita Ann Higgins on which the Press was founded. Alan quotes the late Eavan Boland writing of Salmon as “one of the most innovative\, perceptive and important publishing houses in the UK and Ireland. It has fostered and supported the work of new writers and has established them in the public consciousness.” The book is available from Salmon.\n\nEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is first up and reads for us from her poem In Ostia\, then Nessa O’Mahony joins Jessie in conversation and some of the poets from the volume have recorded their readings to share with us\, we’re delighted to have Gerry Dawe\, Martina Evans\, Jane Clarke and Nessa reading their work. Brava Jessie\, happy anniversary Salmon!\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson\, she was a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week.\n\nSpeaker: Jane Clarke\n\n\n \nJane Clarke is the author of two poetry collections\, The River and When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books 2015 & 2019)\, and an illustrated chapbook\, All the Way Home\, (Smith|Doorstop 2019). She grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon and her work explores enduring connections to people\, place and nature. Jane’s awards include the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the 2016 Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year. She now lives in Glenmalure\, Co. Wicklow where she combines writing with teaching & mentoring creative writing. www.janeclarkepoetry.ie \n\nSpeaker: Gerald Dawe\n\n\n\nGerald Dawe is a retired Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin. He has published eight collections of poetry and several volumes of essays\, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honours\, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. His latest poetry collection Mickey Finn’s Air\, was published in 2014; Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing appeared in 2015. In Another World is available from online retailers and the Irish Academic Press. \n\n\nSpeaker: Martina Evans\n Martina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Her latest collection Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement\, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Currently she is Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and poetry reviewer for the Irish Times. \n\n\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 is 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.. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/days-of-clear-light-1-feb-2021/ CATEGORIES:feminism,film,poetry,publishing,Reading,women LOCATION: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20200126T115034Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200506T162247Z UID:16793-1589311800-1589315400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:ILS / Irish Texts Society Annual lecture - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. \nThe scholar Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. Her subject is Thomas O’Connor (alias Tomás Ó Conchubhair\, b. 1798)\, originally from the civil parish of Templemolaga\, Co. Cork\, he emigrated to London in 1820 where he worked as a tailor until his death around 1870. \nThe evidence in extant Irish manuscripts suggests that he had already begun working as a scribe in his native home place\, but that this role progressed significantly during his years in the Victorian city. His scribal material (in Irish and in English) provides an intriguing insight into a native man of letters who appears to have integrated himself into his host society\, while at the same time preserving a distinctive Irish identity. Moreover\, his fascinating collection of correspondence in English reveals a man with informed views about the language and literature of his native country. And\, in his thirty or so poetic compositions\, personal vignettes come to the fore as well as a great admiration for the Young Ireland movement and\, in particular\, for William Smith O’Brien\, the fair-haired boy (an buachaill bán). \n  \nNí Úrdail first discovered O’Connor while conducting research some years ago on a text known in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Irish manuscripts as Leabhar Oiris (Book of History)\, which is essentially an encomium of the O’Briens of Thomond and this dynasty’s battles for supremacy in Ireland in the tenth and eleventh centuries. She was intrigued to discover that of this work’s twenty-six sources\, one was completed outside Ireland in 1848 by O’Connor “in the city of London” (a ccathair Londoine). Subsequent findings have uncovered eighteen extant manuscripts written entirely or in part by this Cork scribe when he was living in London\, and these are preserved today in the National Library of Ireland\, the Royal Irish Academy\, University College Cork\, NUI Galway and St. Malachy’s College\, Belfast. A further source containing O’Connor’s Irish translation of the first book of Milton’s Paradise Lost (written about the year 1860) is now lost\, but a copy may be consulted on microfilm. In looking through old MSS\, which I purchased in Dublin a good number of years ago\, I find a translation into Irish of the 1st Book of Paradise Lost. It is by one Thomas O’Connor\, who\, from letters accompanying it\, seems to have been a tailor\, resident for many years in London…Letter 23 December 1893\, from Monsignor James O’Laverty to Fr Eugene O’Growney \n\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n  \n \nSpeaker: Associate Professor Meidhbhín Ní ÚrdailMeidhbhín Ní Úrdail is Associate Professor of Modern Irish at University College Dublin. Ní Úrdail’s areas of research include the Irish manuscript tradition; Ireland’s vernacular written tradition from medieval times to the nineteenth century; narrative discourse and historical representation; the complementary relationship between script and print in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Ireland; and contemporary Irish writing and its heritage. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ils-irish-texts-society-annual-lecture/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,history,Irish language,lecture,London-Irish,poetry,politics,research,social history,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/its_ils_2020-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20200126T204729Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200404T103549Z UID:16823-1588015800-1588021200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Moth\, 10th Anniversary - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. \nJoin the Society to celebrate the 10th birthday of The Moth\, one of Ireland’s foremost art and literature magazines. Founded in 2010 by Rebecca O’Connor and Will Govan\, The Moth features poetry\, short fiction and art by established and up-and-coming writers and artists. Each issue also hosts two interviews – with writers such as Sally Rooney\, Sharon Olds\, Colm Toibin and Paul Muldoon. They also publish The Caterpillar and run several art and literary prizes\, including one of the biggest prizes in the world for a single poem. \n  \nWill and Rebecca will regale you with stories about The Moth\, which they run from their home in rural Ireland\, and will be joined by a stellar line-up of past contributors including the novelist Thomas Maloney\, former Moth Poetry Prizewinners Ann Gray and Abigail Parry\, the winner of The Moth Short Story Prize 2019 Conor Crummey\, and newcomers Mark Lawlor and Bryony Littlefair (who recently won a Moth Retreat Bursary). \n\n ‘Exquisitely designed and choc-a-bloc with exciting new artworks and wordworks.’Paul Durcan‘If you want to keep your finger on the pulse\, The Moth magazine is all you need.’Christine Dwyer Hickey \n  \nCopies of The Moth will be available for sale at the event. \n  \nSpeaker: Conor Crummey\n\n\n \nConor Crummey’s story ‘Journeys’ was chosen by author Kit de Waal as the winner of the €3\,000 Moth Short Story Prize 2019. Crummey\, from Belfast\, now lives in London\, where he is a lecturer in public law at Queen Mary University of London. Follow Conor on twitter: @ConorCrummey \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Will Govan\n \n\n\n \nWill Govan is co-founder and director of The Moth. He studied portraiture at The Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and paints at The Moth Studios in Cavan Town in Ireland. He had his first solo exhibition\, Shark With Plunger & Other Paintings\, at the Johnston Central Library in Cavan in July 2019 Follow Will on twitter: @WillGovan1 \n  \nSpeaker: Ann Gray\n \n\n\n \nThe author of a number of collections including Painting Skin (Fatchance Press\, 1995) and The Man I Was Promised (Headland\, 2004)\, Ann was commended for the National Poetry Competition 2010 and won the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2014. \n  \nSpeaker: Bryony Littlefair\n\n\n \nBryony Littlefair is a poet and workshop facilitator living in South London. Her pamphlet Giraffe won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize in 2017 and is out now with Seren Books. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and in 2019 received the Moth Retreat Bursary Award. Follow Bryony on twitter: @B_Littlefair \n  \n \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Thomas Maloney\n\n\n \nThomas Maloney was born in Kent in 1979\, grew up in London\, and studied Physics at Oxford. His first novel\, The Sacred Combe\, was published in 2016. He lives in Oxfordshire with his family. \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Rebecca O’Connor\n\n\n \nRebecca is co-founder and director of The Moth. She edits and designs The Moth and The Caterpillar. Her debut poetry collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Strong Shine Award and she is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize from Poetry Review. Her debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other was published by Canongate in 2018. Follow Rebecca on twitter: @RebeccaMoth \n  \nSpeaker: Abigail Parry\n\nAbigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work\, including the Ballymaloe Prize\, the Troubadour Prize\, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection\, Jinx\, published by Bloodaxe in 2018\, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. Follow Abigail on twitter: @ginpitnancy \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-moth-10th-anniversary-27-april/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,art,Collaboration,history,interview,poetry,Reading,short story,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/moth-slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224130 CREATED:20200122T200034Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200224T163528Z UID:16589-1582572600-1582578000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Ciaran Carson celebration - 24 Feb DESCRIPTION:Irish was his cradle language\, and his writing in English always had the verve and zest of a learned language. This was particularly true of his translations – of Merriman’s Cúirt an Mheán Oíche and the Táin\, or Dante’s Inferno. As well as from Irish and Italian\, he translated short poems from French and Spanish with great style and lucidity.Bernard O'Donoghue\, President of the Irish Literary Society \nThe Irish Literary Society is delighted to partner with The Seamus Heaney Centre\, Queens University Belfast to produce a celebration of the life and work of Ciaran Carson\, the great Belfast poet and former Director of the Centre. Carson was due to deliver last year’s joint Irish Literary Society / Irish Texts Society annual lecture but his cancer diagnosis prevented his coming and we were saddened to hear news of his death in October 2019. \nThe event will be presented by the current Director of the Centre\, Glenn Patterson\, and will feature music\, song\, readings and reflections from Liam Carson\, Cahal Dallat\, Martina Evans\, Leontia Flynn\, Professor Michael Parker\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, James Conor Patterson\, Anton Thompson-McCormick.\n \nCiaran Carson was the first director of the Seamus Heaney Centre\, a dear friend and colleague to all there\, and an inspiration as a poet\, writer\, and as a citizen: a great European literary figure who lived his entire life in Belfast… ‘il professore\, il maestro\,’ in the words of Stephen Sexton\, ‘to whom language itself is indebted.’Glenn Patterson\, Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre\nCarson was a member of Aosdana and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was one of the so-called “Belfast Group” of poets in the 1960s which included Seamus Heaney\, Michael Longley and Paul Muldoon. During his career Carson published 16 volumes of poetry and also wrote a number of novels and books about traditional Irish music. He worked in the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 with responsibility for traditional music and\, more latterly\, literature. In October 2003 he was appointed Professor of Poetry and Director of the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University\, Belfast.\n \nPresented in association with the The Seamus Heaney Centre: \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ciaran-carson-celebration-24-feb/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,music,poetry,politics,Reading,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/ciaran-carson-celebration1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191120T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191120T200000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20190915T202447Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T045046Z UID:12407-1574272800-1574280000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Michael Wood\, Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen - 20 Nov DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is delighted to announce that the speaker for this year’s Annual Yeats Lecture will be Professor Michael Wood. Drawing on his book Yeats and Violence (2010) Professor Wood reflects on how poetry\, seen through the instance of a single poem\, seeks to make sense of a turbulent and dangerous world. Poetry must introduce order and shape where there is none\, and also\, in certain crucial cases\, remain faithful to the disorder and shapelessness of experience. Many poems manage the first of these tasks; very few manage both. W.B. Yeats ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ (written and first published in 1921) is one of them. It is a work which asks what happens when what is taken to be civilisation crumbles. What apocalyptic events wait in the wings? What are history’s victims (and executors) to do except mock and mourn? One hundred years on from the historical setting of the poem we have asked Wood to consider the poem in its historical context and its place in Yeats’ work. Wood will then join our Vice President\, Roy Foster\, in conversation and the poet Martina Evans will offer a poem\, commissioned for this event\, in response to Yeats’ work. “The appeal to the dream has all kinds of echoes in Yeats…we might think the dream justifies the dreamer\, since that is part of the argument of ‘Easter 1916’\, and this is the argument the speaker of ‘Nineteen Hundred and Nineteen’ helplessly gestures towards: ‘We know their dream\,’ the earlier poem says\, ‘enough/To know they dreamed and are dead.’ This particular dream had its price\, even apart from the death of the dreamers. It turned hearts to stone\, it was part of the old myth of sacrifice Yeats himself used to be so eloquent about.” \n \nWood’s criticism is exuberantly characterful\, adventurous in its scholarship\, and greedily\, giddily speculative. Leo Robson\, New Statesman\n \n \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Michael Wood\n\nMichael Wood was born and educated in England but has worked for much of his life in the United States\, first at Columbia University and then at Princeton. He has written books on Luis Buñuel\, Franz Kafka\, Vladimir Nabokov\, and Gabriel García Márquez\, as well as The Road to Delphi\, a study of the ancient and continuing allure of oracles. Among his other works are America in the Movies and Children of Silence. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature\, a member of the American Philosophical Society and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences\, he is a regular contributor to the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books. Selected Works: Stendhal (1971); America in the Movies (1975\, 1989); The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (1994); Children of Silence: on Contemporary Fiction (1998); The Road to Delphi: the Life and Afterlife of Oracles (2003); Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (2005) and Yeats and Violence (2010). \n  \nSpeaker: Martina Evans\n Martina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Her latest collection Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement\, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Currently she is Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and poetry reviewer for the Irish Times. \n \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Roy Foster Roy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914.\n Image above shows detail from Jack B Yeats’ Something in the Air\, 1948. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/michael-wood-nineteen-hundred-and-nineteen-20-nov/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:art,biography,history,lecture,poetry,politics,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/2019-yeats_lecture.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191028T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191028T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 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:20190930T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190930T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20190903T204313Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200203T213016Z UID:12007-1569871800-1569877200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:I Wouldn't Start from Here - 30 Sept DESCRIPTION:The ILS is delighted to start its 2019-20 season with a showcase of second-generation Irish writers in Britain. Not quite British\, not quite Irish\, through their essays\, fiction and poetry about music\, family\, and history these distinguished writers explore questions of identity and belonging and ask the perennial question: where is home – here or Ireland? When questions of authenticity arise\, the slur “plastic Paddy” cannot be far behind and this shameful epithet is referenced in several of the essays here. Moy McRory’s excellent Memory and Authenticity states that the term was “in part given spurs…by the new influx of educated and highly-skilled Irish who encountered the seismic shock of how openly hostile they found their new neighbours on relocation to Britain. When we were lumped in together as ‘English’ we were made invisible. In this way\, a group who had been barely perceived and described were being excluded and silenced”. Martina Evans review in The Irish Times The event also launches the volume I Wouldn’t Start from Here from the new publishing house The Wild Geese Press set up to publish on the Irish diasporic experience. The writers gathered in the volume hold up a mirror to the diverse and complicated experience of the Irish in Britain. \nThe collection features essays\, fiction and poetry from Elizabeth Baines\, Maude Casey\, Ray French\, Maria C. McCarthy\, Dr Tony Murray\, Moy McCrory\, Kath Mckay and John O’Donoghue and many more. \nDuhig’s The Road reflects on his upbringing in London and of family talk of ‘home’ of Irish pub and music culture of North London ‘…near where my father worked in Cricklewood\, was the Galtymore pub/club complex\, a great barn of a place where Sligo flute player Roger Sherlock had been a regular performer in a semi-professional house band. Even so\, Nuala O’Connor’s Bringing It All Back Home reports him saying\, “It still wasn’t enough to make a living out of\, nothing like it.” He also worked “six days a week with pick and shovel . . . mostly roads\, you know\, which was hard work.” Near the Galtymore\, the Crown was effectively a labour exchange for Irish construction workers where cheques could be cashed on pay nights.’ \nThe event includes the editors and contributors to the collection and features the poet Ian Duhig. The moving and insightful essay Ian contributed to the volume was also featured in the Irish Times recently to great acclaim. A book sale and signing will follow the event. \n  \nL TO R: JOHN O’DONOGHUE (PUBLISHER); IAN DUHIG; RAY FRENCH; MOY MCCRORY; KATH MCKAY\, VINCE BURKE \nBefore the launch event on 30 September Vince Burke recorded interviews with the panel and the ILS Chairman\, James Lazar\, you can listen below: \n\n \n \n \n \n \n \n I Wouldn't Start From Here- final version \n \n \n\n \n  \n  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n \nSpeaker: Ian Duhig\n\n\n \nIan Duhig became a full time writer after working with homeless people for fifteen years and having being made redundant. He has published since then\, among other things\, seven books of poetry\, most recently The Blind Roadmaker (Picador\, 2016) which was shortlisted for the TS Elliot and Forward prizes. He works with musicians\, artists and socially excluded groups\, recently editing Any Change: Poetry in a Hostile Environment (2018)\, a small poetry anthology from Leeds immigrant communities chosen as a Poetry School Book of the Year. Duhig has won the Forward Best Poem Prize once and the National Poetry Competition twice. Follow Ian on twitter: @ianduhig \n  \nSpeaker: Ray French\n \nRay French is the author of The Red Jag & other stories and the novels All This Is Mine and Going Under (both Vintage). He is also the co-author of Four Feathers and the co-editor of with Kath Mckay of End Notes: Ten stories about loss\, mourning and commemoration. His short stories have been broadcast on Radio 4 and appeared in numerous magazines and compilations\, including Best European Fiction 2013. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Hull. Some of his essays and podcasts can be found on the Royal Literary Fund website. Follow Ray on twitter @RayFrench15 \n  \n \n \n  \nSpeaker: Moy McCrory\n\n\n \nMoy McCrory is a writer and academic of Irish patronage who writes about identity and class. As a fiction writer she has had three collections of short stories and a novel published. Two of her books were serialised by the BBC and her work has been translated into 15 languages. Her short fiction is widely anthologised and she was included in the seminal Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing. She was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Award. She is a Hawthornden Fellow\, a Senior Fellow of the HEA\, has lectured in Bremen University\, London University and is currently Senior Lecturer at the University of Derby and is a PhD examiner. \n  \nSpeaker: Kath Mckay\n\n\n \nKath Mckay has published two novels\, three poetry collections\, and short stories. Work includes Hard Wired (Moth\, 2016)\, Collision Forces (Wrecking Ball\, 2015) and Telling the Bees (Smiths Knoll\, 2014). Her short stories are anthologised and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She taught creative writing in London and now lectures at the University of Hull. Her most recent book (co-edited with Ray French) is End Notes: Ten stories about loss\, mourning and commemoration (2017). URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/i-wouldnt-start-from-here-30-sept/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:archive,book signing,exile,London-Irish,poetry,politics,Reading,research,social history,tradition,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/start-from-here-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190225T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190225T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20181231T142618Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190219T071945Z UID:11162-1551123000-1551128400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:25 Feb - The North\, Irish poetry special DESCRIPTION:The ILS is working with The North poetry journal for this event to launch their special Irish issue. Editors and poets Jane Clarke and Nessa O’Mahony lead a rich evening of readings and discussion of contemporary Irish poetry. From an issue bursting with ideas and innovation (120 poems by 107 poets) we are gathering some fascinating poets to illustrate the variety and quality of contemporary Irish writing: Siobhán Campbell\, Derek Coyle\, Nora Hughes\, Judy O’Kane (fresh from winning the Charles Causley International Poetry Prize) and Mary Noonan join our hosts. Apart from readings on the night we will be considering recent trends in form and subject\, ideas of Irishness\, poetry and the 20 years of fragile peace in Northern Ireland and\, inevitably\, Brexit. \nThe event is also our farewell to the poet Matthew Sweeney who died last August. Sweeney was a much loved figure on the London literary scene for many years. Ever prolific\, Sweeney published two new collections in his last year\, My Life As a Painter (Bloodaxe) and King of a Rainy Country (Arc) inspired by Baudelaire’s Petits Poèmes en Prose. More work has appeared posthumously in the latest edition of Southword and three poems of Sweeney’s feature in this issue of The North\, we will include a reading.  \nThe widespread dismay amongst Irish writers in response to the gender imbalance of both poets and critics represented in The Cambridge Companion to Irish Poets (2017)\, has led to a flowering of interest in the many overlooked Irish women poets from the seventeenth century to the present day. At this opportune moment we have asked Siobhán Campbell\, to contribute a reflection on the largely forgotten Irish poet Lola Ridge (1873-1941). \nA signing will follow the event.  \n\nChair: Jane Clarke\n\n\n \nJane Clarke grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon and now lives with her partner in Glenmalure in Co. Wicklow. Her first collection\, The River (Bloodaxe Books\, 2015). She was awarded a literary bursary by the Arts Council / An Comhairle Ealaíon in September 2017 for the completion of her second collection and her work on a sequence in response to a soldier’s letters from the Front during World War 1\, in collaboration with the Mary Evans Picture Library\, London. She now combines writing with her work as an independent consultant providing facilitation\, team building and leadership development to public service and not-for-profit organisations. \n\nChair: Nessa O’Mahony\n\n\n\nNessa O’Mahony is a Dublin-born poet and novelist. She has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk (1999)\, Trapping a Ghost (2005)\, In Sight of Home (2009) and Her Father’s Daughter (2014). She isand co-editor with Siobhán Campbell of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her first novel\, The Branchman (Arlen House\, 2018) was recently published. O’Mahony won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards.. \n\n\n\n  \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Siobhán Campbell\n\n\n\nSiobhán is a poet\, critic and lecturer. She is the author of six works of poetry and co-editor with Nessa O’Mahony of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her poetry has received awards in the National Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Competition and is the recipient of an Arts Council award and the Templar Poetry Prize. Much of Campbell’s work is expressive of her interest in the place of the political poem in contemporary poetics – her most recent volume Heat Signature (March\, 2017) reflects on commemoration and the centenary of the Dublin Rising while her Cross Talk (2010) explored boundaries and the interwoven nature of family\, local and historical conflicts. \n\n\n\n\n. \n \n\nSpeaker: Derek Coyle\n\n\nDerek Coyle has published poems in Irish Pages\, The Texas Literary Review\, The Honest Ulsterman\, Orbis\, Cuadrivio\, Skylight 47\, Assaracus\, and The Stony Thursday Book. He has been shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Award (2010\, 2014\, 2015)\, and in 2012 he was a chosen poet for the Poetry Ireland ‘Introductions Series.’ In 2013 he was runner up in the Bradshaw Prize. He is a founding member of the Carlow Writers’ Co-Operative. He lectures in Carlow College/St Patrick’s.. \n \n\nSpeaker: Nora Hughes\n\n\nNora grew up in Belfast. She has lived in London since 1972 and worked in education for many years\, specialising in adult literacy. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies\, including Envoi\, Second Light\, The Interpreter’s House and The Book of Love and Loss (Belgrave Press\, 2014). She is working towards a pamphlet collection. \n\n \n. \n\nSpeaker: Mary Noonan\n\n\n\nMary Noonan was born in London\, but grew up in Cork. Her debut collection of poems was The Fado House (Dublin\, Dedalus Press\, 2012). In 2007\, she was selected to take part in the Poetry Ireland Introductions series in Dublin and was invited to read at the Poetry Hearings festival in Berlin in 2009. The manuscript of The Fado House was awarded the Listowel Poetry Collection Prize in June 2010. She works as a lecturer in French literature at University College Cork. \n \n\n \n\n \n\nSpeaker: Judy O’Kane\n\n\n\nJudy is a prose writer and poet. She worked the wine harvest in St Estèphe\, Bordeaux on sabbatical from legal partnership in Dublin and her work explores terroir\, wine’s sense of place. She has just been announced as the winner of the 2018 Charles Causley International Poetry Competition. In 2017 she won the National Memory Day Prize and the Irish Post Prize\, and was prize winner at Wells Festival of Literature and Guernsey Literary Festival. In 2015 she won the Listowel Writers Week Original Poem Prize. Her poetry is published in The World of Fine Wine\, Landfall\, and The North: The Irish Issue. Thirst\, her non-fiction work-in-progress\, was shortlisted for the Biographers’ Club Tony Lothian Award for best un-commissioned first biography. An extract\, The Drawing Room\, was published by the Manchester Review in December 2017. Judy holds an LL.B from Trinity College Dublin and an MA in Life Writing from UEA\, where she is completing a PhD in Creative and Critical writing. She teaches advocacy at the Law Society of Dublin.\nTwitter @judeokane \n. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/25-feb-the-north-irish-poetry-special/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Collaboration,feminism,folklore,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/the-north-slider-1.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181119T060000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181119T200000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20180912T131231Z LAST-MODIFIED:20181003T201353Z UID:10798-1542607200-1542657600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:On the Pavement Grey: WB Yeats in Utopian Bedford Park - 19 Nov DESCRIPTION:Lecture by Cahal Dallat with guests Ciarán Hinds and Anne-Marie Fyfe & launch of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project\n \nNobel-prizewinning poet\, WB Yeats\, though much inspired by Irish legend\, landscape and longing\, spent two-thirds of his youth in London\, the majority of that time in Chiswick’s Bedford Park\, the Utopian/aesthetic garden-suburb/artists’-colony whose diverse inhabitants fostered his literary talent and endeavours. Irish poet and literary critic\, Cahal Dallat\, has lived within a few blocks of the Yeats family’s two Bedford Park homes for all of his adult life and\, fascinated by the way Willie\, his father\, and his artistic siblings\, negotiated the metropolis’s social networks\, while dreaming of Sleuth Wood or Ben Bulben\, has lectured on the importance to Victorian London of Irish artists (poets\, painters\, playwrights\, composers\, and politicians\, for politics\, too\, is an art in Ireland) … and on the usefulness of London’s complex intersections and patronage to often-penniless\, in a genteel way\, exiled geniuses. In Bedford Park’s heady progressive atmosphere (and its winding if artificially villagey avenues) lay the seeds of Yeats’s genius\, not to mention contemporary theatre\, Modernist poetry and political and cultural changes that would invert the social and imperial order in the 20th century. With contributions and readings from Yeats’s letters and poems by actor Ciarán Hinds and poet Anne-Marie Fyfe.\n \nThe 2018 Irish Literary Society WB Yeats Lecture at the Embassy of Ireland launches the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project founded to mark Yeats’s role in Bedford Park and Bedford Park’s role in Yeats’s artistic development and life\, by placing a permanent artwork at the heart of this progressive\, 19c\, and beautifully preserved\, garden suburb. \nTo apply for an ILS members ticket contact the Hon. Secretary: irishlitsoc@gmail.com Image credit: Camille Pissarro\, Fete de Jubilee a Bedford Park\, 1897. \nSpeakers: Cahal DallatCahal Dallat is a poet\, musician\, critic (b. Ballycastle\, Co. Antrim)\, regular BBC Radio 4 Saturday Review contributor since 1998\, reviewer for TLS and Guardian among others\, founder/organiser of WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project\, and Charles Causley Trust Centenary musician/poet-in-residence. Former winner of Ireland’s leading poetry prize\, the Strokestown International\, his recent awards include the 2017 Keats-Shelley Poetry Prize\, and a 2018 Harry Ransom Center Research Fellowship at University of Texas in Austin (supported by CP Snow Memorial Fund). Latest collection The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff); www.cahaldallat.com \n Ciarán Hinds \nCiarán Hinds was born in Belfast: his television roles include Gaius Julius Caesar in the series Rome and Mance Rayder in Game of Thrones while film has included the lead role in John Banville’s The Sea\, and playing opposite Daniel Day Lewis in Upton Sinclair’s There Will Be Blood.  As a stage actor his recent appearances include Conor McPherson’s The Night Alive\, Hamlet with Bendict Cumberbatch at the Barbican\, McPherson’s ‘Bob Dylan musical’ The Girl from the North Country at the Old Vic\,  and the role of Hugh O’Donnell in Brian Friel’s Translations at the National.   \n Anne-Marie Fyfe \nAfter five poetry collections including House of Small Absences (Seren\, 2015)\, poet\, arts organiser\, creative-writing teacher & former Poetry Society chair\,  Anne-Marie Fyfe\, is currently embarked on a unique Arts-Council-funded 18-month teaching/writing/performing tour\, The Voyage Out\, exploring coastal regions & lives in Britain\, Ireland\, US & Canada\, leading to a new hybrid poetry/prose/travel-writing memoir (due\, Seren\, Spring 2019). Born in Cushendall\, Co. Antrim\, Anne-Marie lives in London where she has run Coffee-House Poetry’s readings & classes at London’s leading live literature venue\, the Troubadour\, since 1997. www.annemariefyfe.com URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/on-the-pavement-grey-wb-yeats-in-utopian-bedford-park-19-nov/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:architecture,biography,Collaboration,exile,history,poetry,social history,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/pavement-gray.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181029T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181029T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20180911T070122Z LAST-MODIFIED:20181112T135217Z UID:10758-1540841400-1540846800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Troubling the Classics - 29 Oct DESCRIPTION:For our October event we’re bringing together a poet\, a novelist and a dramatist to reflect on their work and its place in a rich seam of Irish literature inspired by the Greeks. The continuing interest of Irish writers in Greek and Latin classical literature as a model and source for inspiration is somewhat surprising given the almost complete disappearance of the teaching of classical languages in Irish schools over the last 50 years. Yet the myths and stories of the ancient world still fascinate audiences and our writers continue to deliver fresh interpretations which reflect on Irish society.  \n‘The violence lies in Carr’s language\, shocking and extraordinarily vivid: we almost hear the buzzing of carrion flies\, smell the stench of carnage.’The Times\nThe nationalist attempt to recover the native\, suppressed\, literary tradition of Ireland found a model in 5th century BCE Athenians and their reaching back to the foundational epics of Homer. From the 19th century Irish translations of Greek tragedy were tied up in a project of recovery of a bardic tradition; from Yeats to Heaney this poetic tradition continued and absorbed great figures of modern poetry like MacNeice\, Boland\, Mahon and Kennelly. More recently that tradition has broadened and our dramatists and novelists have found intriguing correspondences in form and culture with the Greeks e.g. Alan McMonagle’s novel Ithaca\, Theo Dorgan’s collections Orpheus and Greek\, Peter Fallon’s versions of Hesiod and of the Georgics of Virgil\, and Frank McGuinness’ startling new versions of Greek drama. Our three guests representing the dramatic\, poetic and prose novel forms will discuss their work and the appeal and relevance of ancient literature. ‘Part of the thrill is recognising the correspondences between the characters and Homer’s originals . . . the language is enough to keep you enthralled . . . Hughes’s achievement is to prove that Homer remains ignoble\, messy and horribly familiar — Guardian’The Guardian Marina Carr’s plays bring alive the Greek classics in a uniquely contemporary and Irish manner. In By the Bog of Cats she reconstructs Medea\, in her Hecuba she positions the Queen at the centre of a drama clearly intended as a corrective to Euripides\, who portrays Hecuba as an enraged avenger. Michael Hughes’s widely praised second novel Country transposes the Illiad to border country\, Northern Ireland\, post-ceasefire\, 1996. After a woman turns informer\, an IRA gang takes matters into its own hands and storms the local British army base. But there is a falling out between Pig\, the gang’s leader\, and the sniper\, Achill. Death and betrayal follow. The poet Peter McDonald’s has lately developed an interest in verse translation from Greek and in 2016 produced The Homeric Hymns (2016)\, a series of verse translations into different English forms\, along with detailed notes on the ancient Greek poems themselves. Speakers: Marina CarrOne of Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights whose poetic tragedies often reinterpret ancient myth and address violence and the place of women in Irish life. Across her great Midlands-set plays Carr creates a timeless version of Ireland\, replete with ghosts\, ill-fated women and tragic families. Throughout her work Carr’s engagement with myth and folktale can be read as a richly imaginative reflection on the development of Irish cultural identity. In 2017 Carr was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a lecturer in Dublin City University’s School of English. She is working on new plays for the Abbey and the Kiln Theatre in London\, the latter about Clytemnestra in the aftermath of the Trojan war will appear in 2019-2020 season. Dr Florence Impens (Chair)Dr Impens holds a PhD in English from Trinity College\, Dublin\, as well as MAs in French and in Irish Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. Her book Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960: The Answering Voice provides the first overview of classical presences in Anglophone Irish poetry after 1960. Focusing on classical presences in the work of Seamus Heaney\, Michael Longley\, Derek Mahon\, and Eavan Boland. She is the author notably of ‘Classics and Irish Poetry after 1960’ in the forthcoming 5th volume of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Kenneth Haynes Ed.)\, and of ‘Classical Roots’ in Seamus Heaney in Context (Geraldine Higgins Ed.)\, due out with Cambridge University Press. Michael HughesMichael Hughes grew up in Keady\, Co. Armagh\, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh and read English at Corpus Christi College\, Oxford before training in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He has worked for many years as an actor under the professional name Michael Colgan\, and he also teaches creative writing. His first novel\, The Countenance Divine\, was published by John Murray in 2016. His widely praised novel Country is published by Hodder & Stoughton and available now. Professor Peter McDonaldProfessor Peter McDonald (born 1962 in Belfast) is a poet\, Professor of English and Related Literature\, he holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church\, Oxford and is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He produced the modern edition of the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (2007). The focus of his research now is the editing of W.B. Yeats’s Complete Poems for the Longman Annotated Poets series. He has published six original volumes of poetry since 1989\, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016)\, and his Collected Poems were published in 2012. A signing of Michael Hughes’ Country and Peter McDonald’s The Homeric Hymns will follow the event. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/troubling-the-classics/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Classics,Greek,history,Latin,novel,poetry,Reading,research,theatre,tradition,translation ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/troubling-classics_slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180219T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180219T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 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:20171114T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171114T200000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 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:20260526T224131 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:20170626T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 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:20170227T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170227T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20170109T151132Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230615Z UID:8846-1488223800-1488229200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin - 27 Feb DESCRIPTION:Renowned poet Ní Chuilleanáin is the current Ireland Professor of Poetry\, she was a founding member and editor of the literary journal Cyphers and is one of the major Irish poets of her generation. This is her first visit to the Irish Literary Society and she will be reading from her own work. Ní Chuilleanáin is the Vermeer of contemporary poetry. Her luminous interiors achieve great visual beauty\, but should not be mistaken for exercises in escapism. They are sites where history and the individual brush against each other\, force fields of action and radiant understanding.\nAingeal Clare\, The Guardian \nShe has won numerous awards and in addition to her poetic output has been an innovative and important publisher of other Irish writers and has translated poetry from Irish (most recently Máire Mhac an tSaoi)\, Italian (Maria Attanasio\, Antonella Anedda and several others) and from the Romanian poetry of Ileana Mӑlӑncioiu The Legend of the Walled-Up Wife (2012). With Medbh McGuckian\, Ní Chuilleanáin also co-translated the poems of Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill in The Water Horse (2001). \nSpeaker:\n\nEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, the late Leland Bardwell and the late Pearse Hutchinson\, she is a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/eilean-ni-chuilleanain-27-feb/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,lecture,poetry ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Eilean_slider-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20161128T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20161128T213000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20160921T144943Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T231416Z UID:8188-1480361400-1480368600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:London Irish poetic tradition - 28 Nov DESCRIPTION:  \nThe ILS teams up with RTÉ’s Poetry Programme to reflect on the London-Irish poetic tradition. Presenter Rick O’Shea talks to the ILS President Bernard O’Donoghue\, and Vice President Roy Foster about the work and reception of Irish poets in London and how the city shaped those writers and fed back into Irish culture. A recording of this event is now available on the RTÉ Poetry Programme website.  \n Our overview takes the Revival as starting point and considers the work of Irish poets who have passed through or settled in London such as Yeats\, Tynan\, Clarke\, MacNeice\, Boland and Heaney. Our panel of poets will reflect on the anxiety of influence\, the notion of tradition and the tensions and opportunities for the Irish poet in London. \nSpeakers:\n\nSiobhán Campbell\nSiobhán is a poet\, critic and lecturer. She is the author of five works of poetry and co-editor of the forthcoming book of essays on the work of Eavan Boland. 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 forthcoming 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\nCahal Dallat\nSince moving to London 40 years ago the Ballycastle native has been a computer scientist and a critic\, a musician and a broadcaster. Dallat’s literary horizons broadened when he joined a nascent poetry workshop run by Robert Greacon\, an esteemed Dublin writer who had relocated to London. His poetry appears in a range of literary magazines & anthologies\, in Trio 7 (with John Kelly & Sean McWilliams\, Blackstaff Press\, 1992)\, Morning Star (Lagan Press\, 1998) and in The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff Press\, 2009).\n\nMartina Evans\nMartina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Martina will feature in the broadcast but will not be present at the event.\n\nProf Roy Foster\nRoy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914.\n\nProf Bernard O’Donoghue\nBernard O’Donoghue is a Professor and Emeritus Fellow in English at Wadham College\, Oxford. He is a poet and literary critic\, and author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995) – he succeeded Heaney as President of the ILS. His most recent poetry collection is The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016)\, which has been shortlisted for the T S Elliot award. Previous volumes include Farmer’s Cross (2011)\, Gunpowder (1995)\, Here Nor There (1999); Outliving (2003)\, Selected Poems in 2008. O’Donoghue was winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award and Cholmondeley Award in 2009.\n\nDeclan Ryan\nDeclan Ryan was born in County Mayo\, Ireland and has lived in London since. His pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series. He is poetry editor at Ambit and teaches at King’s College London. Declan Ryan’s poem\, ‘From Alun Lewis’ was featured in the Autumn 2012 issue of The Poetry Review. His poems and reviews have also been published in Poetry London\, The Rialto\, and elsewhere. He was also named one of the Faber New Poets in 2014. \nReaders: Donal Cox\, Peter Power-Hynes\, Patricia Leventon\, Michael McClain\, Shevaun Wilder. \nShare this Post URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/london-irish-poetic-tradition/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/poetic2.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20161031T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20161031T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20160917T181822Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T233613Z UID:8138-1477942200-1477947600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Rattlebag\, Looking West - 31 Oct DESCRIPTION:Our eclectic Rattlebag forum returns with the novelist Jess Kidd\, poet Kimberly Campanello and academic Clare Walker Gore. Kidd’s brilliantly original debut novel Himself is a gothic detective story set in 1970s Mayo with a cast of ghosts. Having been abandoned on the steps of an orphanage as an infant\, lovable car thief and Dublin charmer Mahony assumed all his life that his mother had simply given him up. But when he receives an anonymous note suggesting that foul play may have led to his mother’s disappearance\, he sees only one option: to return to the rural Irish village where he was born and find out what really happened twenty-six years ago. … “I love this book. It’s a magic realist murder mystery set in rural Ireland\, in which the dead play as important a part as the living. It’s one of those books that has you smiling as you read\, and that you plan to read again very soon.”. Louis de Bernières\, bestselling author of Corelli’s Mandolin on Himself \nDr Campanello is an Irish-American poet who has produced fine work in Strange Country (Dreadful Press\, 2015) which inhabits the complexity of the sheela-na-gigs – ancient stone carvings of female figures that prominently display the vulva\, which are found on churches\, castles and town walls across Ireland and some of Britain. Campanello will read from Strange Country and present her sonically rich project about the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam\, MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla Avant Objects\, forthcoming in 2016). \nDr Clare Walker Gore of the University of Cambridge discusses The Life of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh and what this fascinating biography contributes to our understanding of disabled people in the 19th century. Born at Borris House in County Carlow without hands and feet\, he was an adventurous traveller and a Member of Parliament\, a tiger-hunting landowner whose attempts to resist the rising tide of Irish nationalism were ultimately defeated\, and whose amazing career has been largely forgotten. But how did his first biographer meet the challenge of writing his life? \nOur three panelists will be in conversation with Gavin Clarke. \nSpeakers:\n\nDr Jess Kidd\nJess Kidd has a PhD in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s University in Strawberry Hill and currently teaches Creative Writing to adult learners and undergraduates. Before that she was a support worker specialising in acquired brain injury. She grew up as a part of a large family from Mayo and now lives in London with her daughter. Himself is Jess’ first novel and she is now completing her second\, a contemporary crime novel called Hoarder and a collection of short stories.\n\n\nDr Kimberly Campanello\nKimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart\, Indiana\, and is a dual American and Irish citizen. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her poetry publications include Spinning Cities (Wurm Press\, 2011)\, Consent (Doire Press\, 2013)\, and Imagines (New Dublin Press\, 2015). In October 2015\, The Dreadful Press published Strange Country\, Campanello’s full-length collection on the sheela-na-gig stone carvings. ZimZalla will publish MOTHERBABYHOME\, a book of conceptual and visual poetry in 2016. \nDr Clare Walker Gore\nEarly career researcher working on disability in Victorian literature especially novels by Charles Dickens\, Wilkie Collins\, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot\, and the biographies of the period. Particular interests in disability history and women’s writing. PhD from Selwyn College\, Cambridge\, Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College\, Cambridge from October 2016. \nShare this Post URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/rattlebag-looking-west-31-oct/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,research ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rattlebag-2016-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20161024T183000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20161024T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20161001T125130Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T232339Z UID:8296-1477333800-1477341000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:2016 Yeats Lecture - 24 Oct DESCRIPTION:The Ambassador of Ireland Daniel Mulhall hosts the third Annual Yeats Lecture at the Embassy of Ireland with the Irish Literary Society. Following on from his highly praised television documentary on Yeats\, the musician and activist Sir Bob Geldof talks about his appreciation of the great poet. Geldof argues that as a poet and statesman\, at the vanguard of a cultural revolution\, Yeats brought about immense change in Ireland’s struggle for independence\, without firing a bullet. His Excellency Ambassador Dan Mulhall will introduce the event. \n\nSir Bob Geldof\nSir Bob Geldof is a singer\, songwriter\, author\, and political activist. He rose to prominence as the lead singer of the Irish rock band The Boomtown Rats in the late 1970s and early 1980s\, alongside the punk rock movement. Geldof is widely recognised for his activism\, especially anti-poverty efforts concerning Africa. Geldof was appointed an honorary knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II\, and is a recipient of the Man of Peace title which recognises individuals who have made “an outstanding contribution to international social justice and peace”\, among numerous other awards and nominations. In 2005 he received the Brit Award for Outstanding Contribution to Music. \nShare this Post URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/2016-yeats-lecture-24-oct/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:Collaboration,lecture,Members only-event,poetry,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/2016-yeats-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160321T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160321T213000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20160301T130727Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234019Z UID:7682-1458588600-1458595800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Stinging Fly - 21 March DESCRIPTION:The ILS comes together with The Stinging Fly literary magazine to reflect on the literary legacy of 1916. The bumper anniversary edition\, subtitled ‘In the Wake of the Rising’\, brings together 43 writers to respond to the literature and events of the 1916 Rising. Readings by contributors: Martina Evans\, Aisling Fahy\, Grahame Williams\, and Joan Win Brennan will accompany a discussion between the ILS Hon. Secretary\, Gavin Clarke\, with publisher Declan Meade and guest editor Sean O’Reilly. \n… [I]n today’s tough market\, where literary fiction is no longer the cornerstone of the publishing business\, no longer the prestige flagship of any respectable publishing firm\, the influence of the literary magazine is arguably no longer what it once was. However\, in Ireland\, one small but beautifully formed magazine is bucking that trend\, launching the careers of literary talents\, nurturing them with care and even publishing their work in book form. How\, exactly\, does The Stinging Fly do it?”Alison Walsh\, The Sunday Independent\nSean O’Reilly on editing the special edition:\n\n‘There are many reasons behind the publication of this special edition of The Stinging Fly in the centenary year of the Easter Rising. Perhaps the most important one\, I would say\, is that any literary magazine\, whether it likes it or not\, is a product of the times in which it is made. Hopefully\, it is also an inspirational and critical response to those times. The issue would open up an alternative space for writers to re-read and respond to the events of that Easter Monday\, the background and the legacy\, and to the Proclamation itself\, a founding document of the Republic\, outside of the official events and memorials planned by the government of the day—which\, as I write\, is preparing to go to the people again. The writers were free to respond to this material in whatever way they wanted\, in any shape or form.’\n\nThe ‘In the Wake of the Rising’ issue will feature on The Book on One on RTÉ Radio One during the week March 21st to March 25th.\n\nContributors:\n The Stinging Fly magazine was established in 1997 to seek out\, publish and promote the very best new Irish and international writing. Three issues are published each year. The Stinging Fly Press operates in tandem with the magazine and has published debut short-story collections by Kevin Barry\, Michael J. Farrell\, Mary Costello\, Colin Barrett\, Claire-Louise Bennett and Danielle McLaughlin. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-stinging-fly-in-the-wake-of-the-rising/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,short story ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/stinging-fly-slider-2.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160125T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160125T213000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20151212T130303Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190103T021235Z UID:7340-1453750200-1453757400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Ireland 1916: Death of a Literary Revival? - 26 Jan DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society in association with the Irish Studies Centre\, London Metropolitan University\, present a reflection on the Irish Literary Revival (1891-1922).\n\nIrish artists representing various literary forms will join academics in discussion on the artistic legacy of the Revival. The playwright Marina Carr\, poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and novelist Jennifer Johnston will discuss the influence of the Revival on their work and the place of the artist in Ireland after independence. Prof Declan Kiberd\, Dr PJ Mathews of University College Dublin (joint editors of the recent Handbook of the Irish Revival) will present a literary and historical overview of the period. Dr Tony Murray\, Director of the Irish Studies Centre\, will chair the evening. Members must reserve tickets via the ILS Honorary Secretary (irishlitsoc@gmail.com)\, non-members can purchase tickets via the link below.\n[envira-gallery id=”7761″]\n\n\nfilming at the ILS Revival event with a capacity audience.\n\nSpeakers:\n\nMarina Carr\nOne of Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights whose poetic tragedies often reinterpret ancient myth and address violence and the place of women in Irish life. Across her great Midlands-set plays Carr creates a timeless version of Ireland\, replete with ghosts\, ill-fated women and tragic families. Throughout her work Carr’s engagement with myth and folktale can be read as a richly imaginative reflection on the development of Irish cultural identity.\n\n\nNuala Ní Dhomhnaill\nNí Dhomhnaill is one of the most prominent poets writing in the Irish language today. Her work has reflected profoundly on the tradition shaped by the Revival. From Gaelic myths she has recovered models of powerful Irish women\, including goddesses and queens. Of her work Bernard O’Donoghue\, ILS President\, has written “Her mixture of myth\, linguistic adeptness and feminine address are held together by an outstanding metaphorical force.”\n\nJennifer Johnston\nOne of Ireland’s great writers\, a Whitbread and Booker prize winner\, Johnston has produced brilliant work on the period of 1916-22 in Ireland and on the Great War\, often as a means of examining contemporary Irish life. The Old Jest (1979) and Fool’s Sanctuary (1987) are key works which describe how the War of Independence shattered families and opened class\, gender and religious divides.\n\n\nProfessor Declan Kiberd\nA leading international authority on the literature of Ireland\, both in English and Irish\, Kiberd has authored scores of articles and many books\, including Synge and the Irish Language; Men and Feminism in Irish Literature; Inventing Ireland; and most recently (with P.J. Mathews) Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Political and Cultural Writings 1891-1922 (Abbey Theatre Press\, 2015). He is a regular essayist and reviewer in the Irish Times\, TLS\, London Review of Books and the New York Times.\n\n\nDr PJ Matthews\nSenior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College Dublin\, Matthews’ research interests include: the literature and culture of the Irish Revival\, especially the work of J.M. Synge; twentieth century Irish writing; contemporary Irish theatre\, and Irish music. Publications include The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge; Revival: The Abbey Theatre; Sinn Féin\, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement; and most recently (with Declan Kiberd) Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Political and Cultural Writings 1891-1922 (Abbey Theatre Press\, 2015). He is also co-convenor of the Irish Studies Doctoral Research Network.\n\n\nDr Tony Murray\nDirector of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University\, Murray’s research is in literary and cultural representations of the Irish diaspora with a particular focus on the Irish in Britain. He is responsible for the Archive of the Irish in Britain and 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 Winifred M. Patton and the Irish Revival in London (2014).\nThis event is presented in association with:\nLondon Metropolitan University\, home of the Irish Studies Centre \n\nThe ILS is supported by: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ireland-1916-death-of-a-literary-revival/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,poetry,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/jan-2106_3-3.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20151026T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20151026T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20151026T171323Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234325Z UID:7236-1445887800-1445893200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Raymond Queneau and Dublin 1916 - October 2015 DESCRIPTION:A late addition to the programme to replace the cancelled John Banville appearance we welcome Dr Dennis Duncan to the Society to discuss Raymond Queneau’s 1947 short novel On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes (We Always Treat Women Too Well ) set during the Easter Rising in 1916. The novel was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara\, but Queneau’s work is a wonderful example of his sly\, provocative genius. Queneau was a great admirer of Joyce and kept a notebook to document his reading of Ulysses. Duncan describes Queneau’s erotic and playful twists on history and Joyce’s work thus: ‘The protagonists are a band of rebels who occupy a post office in Dublin\, not the GPO\, but another one\, round the corner on Eden Street. In taking over the building\, the rebels either expel or kill all of the post office staff working there ± the clerks\, tellers\, managers and guards ± with the exception of one woman\, one Gertrude Girdle\, otherwise known as Gertie\, who was in the loo when it happened. The rebels discover Gertie\, and during the course of a somewhat existential interrogation\, she finds her faith in the infallibility of George V irremediably shaken and sets about undermining the rebels\, sowing confusion and dissent among them by systematically seducing them.’ \nILS Rattlebag\nIn addition to this enjoyable and curious look at the events of 1916 as we approach its centenary we have put together a rattlebag of music\, essays\, poetry and film drawn from the talent of the Society:\n My dearest\, forgive me asking you such a question\, but these rebels\, did they – how shall I put it – did they behave correctly towards you? No\, said Gertie. They tried to lift up my beautiful white dress to look at my ankles.Raymond Queneau - We Always Treat Women Too Well \n \n\n \nDonal Cox (Fifth Province) – poetry and performance\n \nDr Tony Murray –  Portrayals of the Post-War Irish Navvy in London\n \nNora Connolly  – poems\n \nShevaun Wilder – Song of Wandering Aengus film\n \nEddie Linden – poems\n\nWe will have an opportunity for some questions after the presentations by Dr Duncan and Dr Murray. \nSpeaker:\n Dr Dennis Duncan\nHis books include Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu\, which appeared with Atlas Press in 2015\, while an edited collection\, Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays\, is in press with Gylphi. He is currently working on a monograph about the early years of the Parisian literary coterie\, the Oulipo and his current research project concerns the history of the book index. He is also interested in literary translation\, and in the European avant-garde of the twentieth century\, in particular the Oulipo and the Collège de ’Pataphysique. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/october-2016-raymond-queneau-and-dublin-1916/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,short story ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/queneau-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20150928T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20150928T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20150919T161423Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234406Z UID:7111-1443468600-1443472200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Órfhlaith Foyle - 28 Sept DESCRIPTION:The 2015-16 season of ILS events kicks-off with the wonderful Órfhlaith Foyle reading from her short story collection Clemency Browne Dreams of Gin\, her poetry and her new novel.\nÓrfhlaith Foyle’s strange stories of violence and yearning beguile the reader even as they disconcert. She is a true original\, a writer of great gifts\, and I find her work immensely compelling and memorable.’Joseph O'Connor on ‘Somewhere in Minnesota’ \nFoyle’s first novel Belios was published by The Lilliput Press. Her first full poetry collection Red Riding Hood’s Dilemma was published by Arlen House and short-listed for the Rupert and Eithne Strong Award in 2011 and chosen as book of the year by Scotland On Sunday newspaper. \nSomewhere in Minnesota (Arlen House\, 2011) was her debut short fiction collection\, and the title story was first published in Faber and Faber’s New Irish Short Stories (2011)\, edited by Joseph O’Connor. Órfhlaith’s second short story collection titled Clemency Browne Dreams of Gin (Arlen House 2014) was chosen as book of the year by The Irish Times newspaper.\n‘Belios is a dark\, rough\, funny novel about a dying genius and his crazed biographer. It rages with wild vitality oddly touched with tenderness. Órfhlaith Foyle has fire in her belly.’Patrick McGrath \nSpeaker:\n\nÓrfhlaith Foyle\nÓrfhlaith Foyle was born in Africa to Irish parents and now lives in Galway\, Ireland. Her work has been published in The Dublin Review\, The Wales Arts Review\, The Manchester Review\, New Irish Writing and The Stinging Fly. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/orfhlaith-foyle-28-september-2015/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,poetry,Reading,short story ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/orla-slider-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20150330T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20150330T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224131 CREATED:20160917T174656Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234648Z UID:8122-1427743800-1427749200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Martin Dyar - 30 March DESCRIPTION:Martin Dyar’s debut collection of poems Maiden Names (Arlen House\, 2013) was a book of the year selection in both the Guardian and The Irish Times\, and was shortlisted for both the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Shine/Strong Award. Martin will read from his work for the Irish Literary Society. \nDyar is the author of an acclaimed play\, Tom Loves a Lord\, about the Irish poet Thomas Moore. He won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2009\, and the Strokestown Award in 2001; has also been the recipient of two Arts Council Bursary Awards for literature. A graduate of NUI Galway\, and Trinity College Dublin\, most recently he was a Writer Fellow at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. He is currently finishing a novel about a cult in the West of Ireland. \n… ‘Martin Dyar’s narratives about the strangeness of the everyday have a vividness and colour which are a thrilling new development in Irish poetry. Their eloquence and life clear the boards of anything tired or familiar\, making room for the language of poetry to move into new areas to cope with the central moments of people’s lives. This is a book of real importance and originality.’ILS President\, Bernard O'Donoghue \nSpeaker:\n \nMartin Dyar\nBorn in Sligo\, Martin Dyar grew up in Swinford in County Mayo. A graduate of NUIG and TCD\, his poetry has received a number of honours\, including the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2009\, and the Strokestown International Poetry Award in 2001. In 2010 he was selected for the Poetry Ireland Introductions Series. He has also been a writer in residence at the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. His debut collection\, Maiden Names\, published by Arlen House\, was shortlisted for the 2014 Piggott Prize. He has received two Arts Council Literature Bursary Awards\, the most recent in 2013. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/martin-dyar-30-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,poetry,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/martin-dyar.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR