BEGIN:VCALENDAR VERSION:2.0 PRODID:-//Irish Literary Society - ECPv6.16.2//NONSGML v1.0//EN CALSCALE:GREGORIAN METHOD:PUBLISH X-ORIGINAL-URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org X-WR-CALDESC:Events for Irish Literary Society REFRESH-INTERVAL;VALUE=DURATION:PT1H X-Robots-Tag:noindex X-PUBLISHED-TTL:PT1H BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:Europe/London BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20190331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20191027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20200329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20201025T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20210328T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20211031T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20220327T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20221030T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20230326T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20231029T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20240331T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20241027T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20250330T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20251026T010000 END:STANDARD BEGIN:DAYLIGHT TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0100 TZNAME:BST DTSTART:20260329T010000 END:DAYLIGHT BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0100 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:GMT DTSTART:20261025T010000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:UTC BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:UTC DTSTART:20120101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20250124T200000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20250124T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20240126T200000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20240126T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20240113T192626Z LAST-MODIFIED:20240120T134525Z UID:20173-1706299200-1706302800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Martin Doyle\, Dirty Linen - 26 Jan DESCRIPTION:We are delighted to kick off 2024 with a collaboration with our friends at the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, home to many of our events over recent years. Martin Doyle will be joining us not in his more familiar capacity as the Literary Editor of the Irish Times but as an author in his own right. His Dirty Linen – The Troubles in My Home Place is a personal and profound exploration of the impact of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish in County Down\, Tullylish – part of both the Linen Triangle\, heartland of the North’s defining industry\, and the Murder Triangle\, an area devastated by paramilitary violence. Martin Doyle\, who grew up there\, lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past\, recording in heartrending detail the toll the conflict took and the long tail of trauma it has left behind. \n\nDoyle skilfully weaves together the two strands of history\, with the decline of the local linen industry serving as a metaphor for the descent into communal violence\, but also for the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict\, survivors maimed in bomb attacks and victims of sectarianism\, both Catholic and Protestant\, entrust him with their poignant stories. This unforgettable chorus of victims’ voices tells a terrible truth\, but the survivors’ stories of endurance and love will also inspire and restore one’s faith in humanity. \n \n \nAll paid up ILS members can claim a code to redeem a free ticket\, just contact the Secretary for the code: irishlitsoc@gmail.com.\n \n\nICC Ticket optionILS Ticket option Tickets are available online and at the venue from the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith: TICKET LINK > The ILS 6 month membership option is now open covering all events January to July 2024: MEMBERSHIP SUBS LINK >\n\n\n \n\n\nSuperb\, really important and moving work that brings the reality of the Troubles to life and restores the human tragedy to its proper place in public memory… a vital\, potent and moving piece of work. — Fintan O’Toole. \n\n\nDirty Linen (Merrion Press\, 2023) \n  \n\n\n\n \n  \n Speakers: Martin Doyle\n\n\n\n Martin Doyle\nMartin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times\, which he joined in 2007.He started his career in London in 1990 with The Irish World\, joined The Irish Post in 1992 and became its editor before moving in 2001 to The Irish Times. He edited A History of The Irish Post\, which was published in 2000 to mark the newspaper’s thirtieth anniversary. A native of Banbridge\, County Down\, he is a graduate of the University of St Andrews\, where he studied French and German. He contributed an essay to The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working Class Voices (Unbound\, 2021) and to The Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace (forthcoming) \n\nAnne Flaherty\n\n\n\n Anne Flaherty\nAnne Flaherty is a journalist who was born in London and grew up in County Clare. Anne has worked for the Irish Press in Dublin and The Irish Times in Belfast as well as reporting from Africa and Asia. She is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin\, holds an MA in Anglo-Irish Writing from Queen’s University Belfast and an MA in Children’s Literature from the University of Surrey. Anne is a Trustee of the ICC key and a member of its literature programming team. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/martin-doyle-dirty-linen-26-jan/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,Border,crime,documentary,London-Irish,Nationalism,politics,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/dirty-linen-banner.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20231027T190000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20231027T190000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20230412T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230412T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20230406T091829Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230406T101506Z UID:19676-1681327800-1681333200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Nicole Flattery - 12 April 2023 DESCRIPTION:New York in the late 1960s: Mae escapes a run-down an apartment\, an alcoholic mother and her mother’s occasional boyfriend to a new life as a typist for Andy Warhol\, transcribing conversations with his friends and associates to provide the material for an unconventional novel. A mordantly funny investigation of celebrity\, obsession\, womanhood and sexuality\, Nothing Special (Bloomsbury) is itself an unconventional debut novel\, following on from Flattery’s acclaimed short story collection Show Them a Good Time. Nicole will join with James Conor Patterson in conversation on her writing and Nothing Special. \n\n …the thrilling sense of Flattery’s aesthetic and intellectual stringency is what comes to define her seemingly low-key enterprise here. You could almost imagine someone reading Nothing Special and not even noticing Warhol at its heart\, which may be the point of a novel that pictures the lives of his unseen instruments.Anthony Cummins\, The Guardian\n\n\n\n  \n Speakers and performers: Nicole Flattery\n\n\n\n Nicole Flattery\nNicole Flattery is the author of the story collection Show Them A Good Time. She is the winner of An Post Irish Book Award\, the Kate O’Brien Prize\, the London Magazine Prize for Debut Fiction\, and the White Review Short Story Prize. Her work has appeared in the Stinging Fly\, the Guardian\, the White Review\, and the London Review of Books. A graduate of the master’s program in creative writing at Trinity College\, Dublin\, she lives in Galway\, Ireland. \n\nJames Conor Patterson\n\n\n\n James Conor Patterson\nJames is the author of the poetry collection ‘Bandit Country’ just released by Picador. He is also the editor of the anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021). His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian\, i-D\, The Irish Times\, Magma\, The Moth\, Morning Star\, New Statesman\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Poetry London\, Poetry Review\, RTÉ Culture\, The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine\, among others. \n\n\n\n\n\nThe event will be followed by a sale and signing. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/nicole-flattery-12-april-2023/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:America,book signing,emigration,interview,music,politics,Reading,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Nothing-Special.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20230327T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20230327T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20221205T175715Z LAST-MODIFIED:20230316T092321Z UID:19577-1679945400-1679950800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Jess Kidd and Mike Dash on the Batavia - 27 March DESCRIPTION:We’re delighted to welcome back Jess Kidd to the Society to discuss her novel\, The Night Ship. The novel is based on the extraordinary story of the Batavia\, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company that in 1628 was wrecked on Morning Reef\, on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off western coast of Australia. Its wrecking was followed by factions in the crew instigating a massacre of most of the survivors. This was amongst the first contacts of europeans with the continent of Australia and provides a brutal alternative to the myth of Cook’s arrival bringing Enlightenment values.\n\nJess will be joined by the historian Mike Dash whose fascinating account of the Batavia story\, Batavia’s Graveyard (2002) opens up a wider history of the Dutch Republic\, seventeenth century trade and exploration. In both Dash’s history and Kidd’s novel the later discovery of the Batavia and its archeological recovery feature. Kidd establishes a connection over the span of centuries via the lives of two young characters: in 1628 a girl shipwrecked on an island off Western Australia and\, in the 1980s\, a boy finding a home with his grandfather on the very same island. Dash’s book was the invaluable starting point to Kidd’s research which led her from Haarlem and Amsterdam to Australia. The wreck was discovered in 1963\, over the next two decades\, archaeological excavations of the ship and various campsites evidenced the extent of the savage campaign. Find out more about Kidd’s research trip on her site: jesskidd.com \n\nLyrical\, haunting\, a beautiful and elegant fictional interpretation of history\, I loved it.Kate Mosse on Kidd's The Night Ship\nScholarly and exhilarating. Not only history\, but an enthralling sea yarn and true-crime thriller.Associated Press on Dash's Batavia's Graveyard\n\n\n\n\n\n\nThis event will be followed by a signing and a book sale. \n\n Speakers: Jess Kidd\n\n\n\n Jess Kidd\nJess Kidd is the author of three novels and is the winner of the 2016 Costa Short Story Award. Jess’ debut novel\, Himself\, was published by Canongate in October 2016. The Hoarder\, her second novel\, hit the shelves in February 2018. Jess’s third book the marvellous Victorian\, supernatural thriller\, Things in Jars came out in 2019 featuring the intrepid detective Bridie Devine. She is also currently developing her own original TV projects with leading UK and international TV producers\, her children’s book Everyday Magic was published in 2020. Find out more on her website: jesskidd.com \n\nMike Dash\n\n\n\n Mike Dash\nDash read history at Cambridge and went on to complete a PhD back in 1990. Since then he has enjoyed an eclectic career as a journalist\, magazine publisher and author\, in the course of which he has written five heavily-researched and acclaimed books: Tulipomania\, Batavia’s Graveyard\, Thug\, Satan’s Circus and The First Family. He has also run the Smithsonian Museum’s history blog. Find out more on his website: mikedash.com URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/jess-kidd-and-mike-dash-on-the-batavia-27-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Australia,book signing,history,interview,Mutiny,naval history,novel,politics,religion,research,social history,violence ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Batavia-night-ship-date-2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20221017T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20221017T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20211115T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20211015T053505Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211028T094614Z UID:18465-1637004600-1637010000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Reflections from the Border - 15 November DESCRIPTION:  \n\nAs tension persists over the future of the Protocol and frustration is leading to renewed speculation of the possibility of a United Ireland we engage with four writers whose work is gathered in a landmark new anthology reflecting on the border. The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island\, 2021) is a landmark anthology of fiction\, non-fiction and poetry. Amid renewed international focus on the border in Ireland the anthology contributors Darran Anderson\, Jill Crawford\, Michael Hughes\, Séamus O’Reilly and editor James Conor Patterson join us to read from their work and discuss the meaning of partition in the 21st century for those people that inhabit the divide. \n\n\nThe idea for the book has been on my mind for some time now\, probably since the Brexit vote when it became apparent that there would be consequences for freedom of movement across the Irish border. I quickly found that for all the news reports\, vox pops and column inches being filled\, very often the voices which were left out of the conversation were the ones most affected by it\, and I wanted to redress that balance by giving border writers the opportunity to speak their truths. Working with New Island on this book has been an absolute dream\, and given that they are behind some of the most important anthologies of Irish writing to date\, I can’t wait to share this latest project with the world. — James Conor Patterson\, Anthology Editor. \n\n\nThe New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021) \n  \n\n  \n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n\nSpeaker: Darran Anderson\n\n\n \nDarran Anderson is the author of Imaginary Cities (2015)\, chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ by the Financial Times\, the Guardian\, the A.V. Club and others\, and described by the Guardian as ‘a dizzying and brilliant piece of creative non-fiction’. He has co-edited The Honest Ulsterman\, 3:AM Magazine\, Dogmatika and White Noise. He writes for the likes of the Atlantic\, frieze magazine\, and Magnum\, and has given talks at the V&A\, the LSE\, the Robin Boyd Foundation and the Venice Biennale. \n  \nSpeaker: Jill Crawford\n\n\n \nJill is a rural Northern Irish writer\, based in London. Fiction at Stinging Fly\, n+1\, Winter Papers\, Stranger’s Guide\, and Faber’s ‘Being Various’: New Irish Short Stories. \n  \n \nSpeaker: Michael Hughes\n\n\n \nMichael Hughes grew up in Keady\, Co. Armagh\, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh and read English at Corpus Christi College\, Oxford before training in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He has worked for many years as an actor under the professional name Michael Colgan\, and he also teaches creative writing. His first novel\, The Countenance Divine\, was published by John Murray in 2016. He previously spoke at the ILS on his widely praised second novel Country (Hodder & Stoughton\, 2018). \n  \n  \n \nSpeaker: Séamas O’Reilly\n\n\n \nSéamas O’Reilly is a columnist for the Observer and writes about media and politics for the Irish Times\, New Statesman\, Guts and VICE. He shot to a kind-of prominence with a range of online endeavours including ‘Remembering Ireland’\, a parody of Irish nostalgia sites\, which featured entirely invented moments from Irish history. In 2016\, he posted a long Twitter thread about the effects Brexit would have on Northern Ireland\, which led to his first political writing for the New Statesman. Later on that year\, his exasperated reviews of the novels of erstwhile footballer and manager Steve Bruce led to his participation in events with Guardian Football Weekly and various others. Séamas lives in Hackney with his family. \n  \n\nSpeaker: James Conor Patterson\n\n\n \nJames is the editor of the anthology in discussion The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021). He is also author of the poetry collection ‘Bandit Country’ forthcoming from Picador in Autumn 2022. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian\, i-D\, The Irish Times\, Magma\, The Moth\, Morning Star\, New Statesman\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Poetry London\, Poetry Review\, RTÉ Culture\, The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine\, among others. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/reflections-from-the-border-15-november/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,documentary,history,interview,politics,publishing,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/new-frontier-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211108T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20211015T034805Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211015T090439Z UID:18449-1636399800-1636405200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Irish-London - 8 November DESCRIPTION:Professor Richard Kirkland joins in conversation with Roy Foster\, the Society’s Vice President\, on Kirkland’s new book Irish London: A Cultural History 1850–1916 (London: Bloomsbury\, 2021). In the years following the Irish Famine (1845–52)\, London became one of the cities of Ireland. The number of Irish in London swelled to over 100\,000 and from this mass migration emerged a distinctive and vibrant culture based on a shared sense of history\, identity and experience. In this book\, Richard Kirkland brings together elements in Irish London’s culture and history that had previously only been understood separately or indeed largely overlooked (as in the case of women’s’ contributions to London Irish politics and culture). In particular\, Kirkland makes resonant cultural connections between Irish and cockney performers in the music halls\, Irish trade fairs\, temperance marches\, the Fenian dynamite war of the 1880s\, St Patrick’s Day events\, and the later cultural agitation of revivalists such as W.B. Yeats and Katharine Tynan. \n  \n\nSpeaker: Professor Richard Kirkland\n\n\n \nRichard Kirkland is Professor of Irish Literature & Cultural Theory at King’s College London. Professor Kirkland’s research is focused on the literature\, culture\, and politics of Ireland in the modern period of contemporary Northern Ireland\, during the Irish Literary Revival of the early twentieth century\, and in the context of the Irish in London. He has written four monographs and co-edited two collections of essays grouped around these areas. \n  \nSpeaker: Professor Roy Foster Roy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914 came out in 2014 and his most recent work On Seamus Heaney (Princeton\, 2020) came out last year and is the subject of an ILS film with Roy and Catherine Heaney.\n  \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/irish-london-8-november/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:emigration,history,interview,London-Irish,politics,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/IRISH-LONDON-SS.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211025T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211025T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20200512T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200512T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20200224T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20260526T224433 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:20260526T224433 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:20260526T224433 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:20190605T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20190319T153508Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190604T084909Z UID:11402-1559763000-1559766600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Essaying the Body: Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine - 5 June DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Emilie Pine join the ILS to discuss their recent books of essays. Pine’s winning last year’s An Post Irish Book of the Year seemed to mark a reemergence of the essay form in Irish literature. Perhaps the flourishing of literary journals in Ireland has encouraged this\, perhaps the renewed appreciation of Hubert Butler’s work has been an influence\, certainly his cosmopolitan sensibility is present in the recent creative non-fiction of Brian Dillon\, Kevin Breathnach\, Ian Maleney… \n\nI’ve never read anything quite like these essays. Pine’s fluent intelligence flows through each question\, each dilemma\, in its own inimitable way. It’s the kind of book you want to give to everyone\, especially young women and men\, so that we can learn together to take ourselves and each other more seriously.Martina Evans in the Irish Times on Notes to Self\n \n\nThe personal essays of Pine and Gleeson share the ambition of those authors\, yet move inward reflecting on their own bodily traumas and the politics of the female body in Ireland in the last 50 years. In its variously raw\, funny\, acute manner Pine’s vivid collection addresses addiction\, fertility\, feminism\, sexual violence and depression. The formal experimentation of Gleeson’s Constellations is startling\, throughout this intimate account of pain is illuminating of art and the wider world. \n\n\nBooks will be for sale after and the authors will be available to sign.\n\n\n \nChair: Dr Lara Feigel\n\n\n \nDr Feigel is a literary critic and cultural historian teaching in the English department at King’s College London. Her most recent book Free Woman is an investigation of freedom that’s part memoir and part biography of Doris Lessing. It interweaves life and literature to think about motherhood\, sex\, madness and communism\, testing the gains and costs of living freely. At King’s she co-directs the Centre for Modern Literature and Culture and runs the Ivan Juritz Prize\, which celebrates creative experiment in all art forms. She reviews regularly for various publications (most frequently the Guardian and the Observer). \n  \n\n \n \nSpeaker: Sinéad Gleeson\n\n\n \nSinéad Gleeson is a writer of essays\, criticism and fiction. Her writing has appeared in Granta\, Winter Papers and Gorse\, and a story of hers will appear in Being Various: New Irish Short Stories published by Faber in May 2018. She is the editor of three short story anthologies\, including The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers and The Glass Shore: Short Stories by Women Writers from the North of Ireland\, both of which won Best Irish Published Book at the Irish Book Awards. Sinéad has worked as an arts critic and broadcaster and has presented The Book Show on RTÉ Radio 1. She is working on a novel. \n  \n\n \nSpeaker: Dr Emilie Pine\n\n\n \nEmilie Pine is Associate Professor of Modern Drama at University College Dublin. Emilie is Editor of the Irish University Review and Director of the Irish Memory Studies Network (www.irishmemorystudies.com). She is PI of the Irish Research Council New Horizons project Industrial Memories a digital humanities re-reading of the Ryan Report on institutional child abuse (https://industrialmemories.ucd.ie). Emilie has published widely in the field of Irish studies and memory studies\, including The Politics of Irish Memory: Performing Remembrance in Contemporary Irish Culture (Palgrave\, 2011) and The Memory Marketplace: Performance\, Testimony and Witnessing in Contemporary Theatre (forthcoming Indiana University Press\, 2019). Her first collection of personal essays\, Notes to Self\, was published by Tramp Press (2018). \n  \n\nImage above: Femme nue auprès d’une glace\, 1889 by Paul-Albert Besnard. Held in the Metropolitan Museum of Art\, New York. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/essaying-the-body-sinead-gleeson-and-emilie-pine-5-june-2/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,feminism,history,interview,lecture,medical,politics,Reading,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/essaying-the-body.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190429T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190429T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20190111T123643Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190319T122821Z UID:11239-1556566200-1556571600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:29 April - Ciaran Carson DESCRIPTION:UNFORTUNATELY THIS EVENT IS NOW CANCELLED. NOTICE OF A REPLACEMENT EVENT WILL BE SENT OUT TO SUBSCRIBERS ASAP. TICKET REFUNDS WILL BE ISSUED. \n\nThe poet Ciaran Carson visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O’Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. Carson’s title for this talk ‘From There to Here: Some Reflections on Translation’ references his retrospective collection ‘From There to Here’ which opens “slender-beaked\, my pen jets forth/a stream of beetle-coloured ink”. That ink has flowed prodigiously over the years since his first publication\, The New Estate (1976). While firmly rooted in Belfast life Carson’s work has embraced an unusually wide range of forms\, style and subject matter. His translations from the Irish include versions of the Táin (2007) and Merriman’s The Midnight Court (2006)\, and this collection contains more previously unpublished translations from the Irish. Translation has informed his own poetry\, in particular\, the his translation of the Old Irish epic\, The Tain (Penguin Classics\, 2007)\, suggested a new linguistic territory to him and led to three collections of poems in quick succession: For All We Know (2008)\, On the Night Watch (2009)\, and Until Before After (2010). From his dazzling\, astonishingly inventive translations to his own poems and prose\, Ciaran Carson continues to demonstrate what it means to have ears that truly work. He is one of the best poets on either side of the Atlantic and the publication of every one of his books is a major event in our literatures.Charles Simic\nCarson’s translations have looked abroad too and include works from Ovid\, Rimbaud\, Mallarmé\, and a revelatory version of Dante’s Inferno. Carson’s work is both political and personal as it engages recent history—including the Troubles and violence in Northern Ireland—and the past. In The Irish for No\, Carson’s long lines encompass listings of both urban realities and nostalgic images of the past\, linking memory and cartography to give a portrait of life in Belfast. The more recent On the Night Watch and Until Before After offer more personal lyrics. Carson’s interest in traditional Irish music informs Last Night’s Fun: About Music\, Food and Time (1997)\, a book of prose\, and the history of Belfast plays in his memoir\, The Star Factory (1998). Carson is also author of the novel Shamrock Tea (2001). \n\nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society: \n\n\n\n\nA signing of From There to Here will be held after the talk. \n\nSpeaker: Ciaran CarsonBorn in Belfast\, Northern Ireland\, into an Irish-speaking family\, poet Ciarán Carson attended Queen’s University\, Belfast. He held the position of traditional arts officer of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland from 1975 to 1998 and was appointed director of the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry at Queen’s University in 2003. Carson is the author of a number of collections of poetry\, including The Irish for No (1987)\, winner of the Alice Hunt Bartlett Award; Belfast Confetti (1989); First Language: Poems (1994)\, winner of the T.S. Eliot Prize; Breaking News (2003)\, winner of the Forward Poetry Prize; For All We Know (2008); On the Night Watch (2010); and Until Before After (2010). Wake Forest University Press has published his work for American readers\, including The Midnight Court (2006)\, a translation of the 18th-century Irish poet Brian Merriman’s work\, and Carson’s own Collected Poems (2009). \n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/29-april-ciaran-carson/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:folklore,history,Irish language,lecture,politics,Reading,social history,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ciaran-carson-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20190319T153727Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190412T190927Z UID:11404-1555615800-1555621200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Country Girls\, a celebration - 18 April DESCRIPTION:I wakened quickly and sat up in bed abruptly. It is only when I am anxious that I waken easily and for a minute I did not know why my heart was beating faster than usual. Then I remembered. The old reason. He had not come home…\n\nSo begins Edna O’Brien’s The Country Girls. With the support of the Dublin: One City\, One Book festival we are bringing together a fascinating panel to discuss The Country Girls trilogy as it is being celebrated in Dublin as the chosen festival book. Quite clearly we are not in Dublin but we’re delighted to extend the consideration of O’Brien’s work to London\, a city pivotal to her writing career and the setting for the last part of the trilogy. The special edition of the trilogy produced for this celebration is published by Faber & Faber and is introduced by Eimear McBride. The trilogy changed the temperature of Irish literature in the 1960s and inspired generations of readers and writers. O’Brien’s invocation of female characters who dared desire more from life than domestic and sexual servitude\, emotional disaffection and intellectual abnegation\, was nothing short of revolutionary. Not only was O’Brien giving voice to the voiceless\, she was washing the nation’s dirty laundry in public\, laundry which has proved so dirty that\, more than 50 years later\, it is still proving in need of a rinse.Eimear McBride The passion\, artistry and courage of Edna O’Brien’s vision in these novels continue to resonate into the 21st century. In addition to readings and discussion our panel will consider the role of the city in the books\, how the romantic aspects of O’Brien’s work have coloured her reception and O’Brien’s influence on younger writers. Dublin One City One Book is a Dublin City Council initiative\, led by Dublin City Public Libraries\, \n  \n\nPresented in association with the Dublin: One City One Book: \n  \n\n \n \nChair: Dr Anne Goudsmit\n\n\n \nDr Anne Goudsmit left Ireland to study at Sussex University and at the Sorbonne before moving to London. Her early career was in Finance\, when she worked at Citibank and subsequently at ITV. Anne wrote her PhD thesis on Northern Irish fiction at St Mary’s University\, Twickenham\, where she was a visiting lecturer. She is a member of the Irish Literary Society. She recently became a member of the board at the Irish Cultural Centre where she convenes a monthly Book Club. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Helen Cullen\n\n\n\nHelen Cullen is an Irish writer living in London. She worked at RTÉ for seven years before moving to London in 2010. Her debut novel\, The Lost Letters of William Woolf was published by Penguin in July 2018. Helen is now writing full-time and working on her second novel. She is also a contributor to the Irish Times newspaper and Sunday Times Magazine. Helen holds an M.A. Theatre Studies from UCD and is currently completing an M.A. English Literature at Brunel University. She was nominated as Best Newcomer in the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Dr Sinéad Mooney\n\n\n \nDr Sinéad Mooney is a graduate of University College Cork and the University of Oxford. She is currently a senior lecturer in English at De Montfort University\, Leicester\, where she teaches Irish literature and creative writing. Her monograph\, A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (Oxford University Press) won the 2012 American Conference for Irish Studies Robert Rhodes Prize\, and her chapter on Edna O’Brien appeared in the recent in A History of Modern Irish Women’s Literature\, edited by Clíona O’Gallchóir and Heather Ingman. She is currently working on a study of Irish women’s modernism. \n  \n  \n\nSpeaker: Paula McGrath\n\n\n \nPaula McGrath lives in Dublin. A History of Running Away is her second novel. Her first\, Generation\, was published in 2015. She has a background in English Literature and is currently an Irish Research Council (Government of Ireland) PhD scholar at the University of Limerick. She received an Arts Council literary bursary in 2016\, and was recently Irish Writers Centre Writer-in-Residence in St Mark’s English Church\, Florence. In another life she was a yoga teacher. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-country-girls-a-celebration-18-april/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,history,interview,politics,Reading,religion,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/country-girls-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190325T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190325T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20180724T141112Z LAST-MODIFIED:20190219T072740Z UID:10534-1553542200-1553545800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:25 March - Working Class Irish Literature DESCRIPTION:In the recent years of political and social turbulence in the UK\, state of the nation debates have become commonplace and discussion on the representation of working class lives in literature has become a hot topic. A clearer recognition is emerging that publishers must overcome barriers of class and social mobility with the same level of commitment that has developed to respond to inequities in relation to race\, disability and gender. A false notion persisted beyond the early years of the state that Ireland was a classless society\, but shared political struggles cannot erase huge differences of opportunity and wealth. Recent non-fiction books have made significant contributions to such debates across both countries (Chavs – the Demonization of the Working Class; Know Your Place: Essays on the Working Class and the History of Irish Working-Class Writing) and helped to highlight the marginalisation of working class voices and\, conversely\, the rich and various history of working class writing. We are delighted to bring together two writers whose work has embraced their origins and created compelling fictions peopled by working class characters. \n‘…when I began writing I wanted to imitate my heroes\, to take ordinary\, everyday people and make them the centre of the story\, as James Joyce does in Dubliners\, or as Kevin Barry and Lisa McInerney do with their spot-on\, lyrical descriptions of small city lives today.’Kit de Waal in The Guardian\nThe poet\, publisher\, sometime factory hand and journalist Dermot Bolger has throughout his plays\, poems and novels chronicled the lives of those around him in his native housing estate of Finglas in Dublin. His work often puzzles over the sustained power of nationalist concepts of Irishness. Bolger’s will read from his latest novel An Ark of Light which features the remarkable Eva Fitzgerald who defies convention in 1950s Ireland by leaving a failed marriage to embark on an extraordinary journey of self-discovery. It takes her from teeming Moroccan streets and being flour-bombed in radical marches in London.  \nWhen Kit de Waal was growing up in 1970s Birmingham\, no one like her – poor\, black and Irish – wrote books. After securing a book deal for her first novel My Name is Leon de Waal used some of her advance to set up a creative writing scholarship to try to improve working-class representation in the arts. Her most recent novel\, A Trick to Time\, features Mona\, a young Irish girl in the big city\, with the thrill of a new job and a room of her own in a busy boarding house. On her first night out in 1970s Birmingham\, she meets William\, a charming Irish boy with an easy smile and an open face. They embark upon a passionate affair\, a whirlwind marriage – before a sudden tragedy tears them apart.‘Pound for pound\, word for word\, I’d have Bolger represent us in any literary Olympics.’Colum McCann\nA signing of both books will be held after the talk. \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Kit de WaalKit de Waal\, born to an Irish mother and Caribbean father\, was brought up among the Irish community of Birmingham in the 60’s and 70’s. She worked for fifteen years in criminal and family law\, was a magistrate for several years and sits on adoption panels. She used to advise Social Services on the care of foster children\, and has written training manuals on adoption\, foster care and judgecraft for members of the judiciary. Her writing has received numerous awards including the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her debut novel My Name Is Leon was an international bestseller\, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award\, long-listed for the Desmond Elliott Prize and won the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award for 2017. Her second novel The Trick to Time is an unforgettable tale of grief\, longing\, and a love that lasts a lifetime. \n\n\n \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Dermot Bolger\n\n\n\nBorn in Dublin in 1959\, Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known writers. His fourteenth novel\, An Ark of Light (2018) follows titles such as The Journey Home\, Father’s Music\, The Valparaiso Voyage\, The Family on Paradise Pier\, A Second Life: A Renewed Novel\, New Town Soul  and the novella\, The Fall of Ireland. His first play\, The Lament for Arthur Cleary\, received the Samuel Beckett Award; his acclaimed Ballymun Trilogy of plays has been staged in several countries and in 2012 his stage adaption of James Joyce’s Ulysses was widely praised. A poet\, his ninth collection of poems\, The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss\, was published in 2017. Bolger writes for Ireland’s leading newspapers and in 2012 received the Commentator of the Year Award at the Irish Newspaper awards. \n\n\nChair: Dr Tony Murray \nTony Murray is Director of the Irish Writers in London Summer School and Curator of the Archive of the Irish in Britain. Murray’s research is in literary and cultural representations of the Irish diaspora with a particular focus on the Irish in Britain. He is especially interested in the role of narrative in the construction and mediation of migrant identities. Publications include London Irish Fictions: Narrative Diaspora and Identity (2012) and Writing Irish Nurses in Britain (2018). URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/working-class-irish-writing/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Class,feminism,interview,lecture,politics,Reading,social history,tradition,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/working-class-lit-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190225T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190225T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20180219T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180219T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 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:20260526T224433 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:20260526T224433 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:20260526T224433 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:20141030T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20141030T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20161006T185220Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234856Z UID:8356-1414697400-1414701000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Cover-up in the Congo? - 30 Oct DESCRIPTION:Dr Kennedy’s recent book Ireland\, the UN and the Congo takes a fresh look at Ireland’s part in the UN’s disastrous mission in the Congo in the early 1960s. In summer 1961 Irish diplomat Conor Cruise O’Brien was appointed UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold’s Special representative in the breakaway Congolese province of Katanga. In ONUC\, its biggest peacekeeping mission to date\, the UN had deployed to Congo a year previously to try to stabilise the newly independent African state. The Secretary General and his officials got drawn into the lethal realities of Congolese and Katangese politics.\nAs a military and diplomatic history it has many strengths\, principally its showcasing of original and highly revealing archival material\, and an admirable clarity in providing a more robust and honest version of the mission than has been available to date. This is partly due to the book’s joint authorship. Michael Kennedy has long been established as an impressive historian of Irish foreign policy\, while his collaborator\, Art Magennis\, undertook two tours of duty in the Congo. Diarmaid Ferriter\, in the Irish Times\nMystery still surrounds the events of September 1961 in Katanga where UN peacekeepers\, including Irish soldiers\, unsuccessfully went to war against the province in an attempt to ends its secession. Peacekeepers\, Katangese military and civilians were killed\, both sides committed atrocities which were only partially reported\, Hammarskjold died in a mysterious plane crash whilst seeking to end the fighting\, and some months later O’Brien was forced to resign\, ostensibly for reasons related to his private life. With the release of the UN’s own archives on the Congo mission O’Brien’s actions\, Hammarskjold’s involvement in authorising the UN’s military action against Katanga\, and the UN’s subsequent protestations that the organisation and the Secretary General knew nothing of ONUC’s intentions in Katanga can be examined for the first time. The new records call into question existing accounts of the UN mission in Congo. O’Brien’s account of his UN service\, written immediately after his resignation\, To Katanga and Back is a classic but with the release of the UN’s archives\, the limitations of the works appear. \nFifty years later a major re-evaluation of the UN’s failed military adventure in Katanga is possible\, and using material from archives in New York\, Stockholm\, Dublin and London this talk hopes to provide a greater insight into a hitherto secret and mystifying chapter of the UN’s history. \nSpeakers:\n\nDr Michael Kennedy\nDr Kennedy has written widely on British-Irish relations and on cross-border relations in Ireland\, including Division and Consensus: the politics of cross-border relations in Ireland 1921-1969 (Dublin\, 2000). He has also written extensively on Ireland’s foreign and defence policies\, including Ireland and the League of Nations\, 1919-46 (Dublin\, 1996)\, Obligations and Responsibilities: Ireland and the United Nations\, 1955-2005 (with Deirdre McMahon) (Dublin\, 2005)\, Guarding Neutral Ireland (Dublin\, 2008) and The Irish Defence Forces 1940-49: The Chief of Staff’s Reports (Dublin\, 2011) (with Commandant Victor Laing). He has recently co-edited\, with John Doyle\, Ben Tonra and Noel Dorr\, the first text book on Ireland’s international relations\, Irish Foreign Policy\, which was published by Gill and Macmillan earlier this year. Dr Kennedy is a member of the Irish Manuscripts Commission and a Research Associate of the Centre for Contemporary Irish History\, Trinity College\, Dublin. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/cover-up-in-the-congo-30-oct/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,lecture,politics,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/kennedy-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20140227T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20140227T210000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20161015T120324Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T235259Z UID:8480-1393529400-1393534800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Dublin Lockout - 27 Feb DESCRIPTION:This month’s lecture will be delivered by Padraig Yeates on the Dublin Lockout\, the past year of commemoration and lessons drawn from the experience. \nOn 26 August 1913 the trams stopped running in Dublin. Striking conductors and drivers\, members of the Irish Transport Workers’ Union\, abandoned their vehicles. They had refused a demand from their employer\, William Martin Murphy of the Dublin United Transport Company\, to forswear union membership or face dismissal. The company then locked them out. Within a month\, the charismatic union leader\, James Larkin\, had called out over 20\,000 workers across the city in sympathetic action. By January 1914 the union had lost the battle\, lacking the resources for a long campaign. But it won the war: 1913 meant that there was no going back to the horrors of pre-Larkin Dublin. Yeates outstanding survey in Lockout: Dublin 1913 has already established itself as the definitive work on the Lockout. \nImage: Part of the 1913 Lockout tapestry as designed by Robert Ballagh \nSpeakers:\n\nPadriag Yeates\nPadraig Yeates is a member of the 1913 Committee that co-ordinated events around the Lockout Centenary during 2013. He is a former Industry and Employment Correspondent of the Irish Times and has been a union activist all his life. He has written several books including Lockout: Dublin 1913\, A City in Wartime: Dublin 1914-1918 and A City in Turmoil: Dublin 1919 -1921. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/dublin-lockout-27-feb/ LOCATION:The Doubletree by Hilton\, 2 Bridge Place\, Victoria\, London\, SWIV 1QA\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,lecture,politics,research,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/dublin-lockout-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20130228T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20130228T203000 DTSTAMP:20260526T224433 CREATED:20161121T073625Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T235422Z UID:8626-1362079800-1362083400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Hubert Butler - 28 Feb DESCRIPTION:Robert Tobin’s study of Butler is masterly … Tobin mixes familiarity with objectivity\, scrupulous scholarship\, and a gossip’s curiosity.Caroline Bowder\, Church Times‘How do such people\, with brilliant members and dull ones\, fare when they pass from being a dominant minority to being a powerless one?’ So asked the Kilkenny man‐of‐letters Hubert Butler (1900‐91) when considering the fate of Southern Protestants after Irish Independence. As both a product and critic of this culture\, Butler posed the question repeatedly\, refusing to accept as inevitable the marginalization of his community within the newly established state. Inspired by the example of the Revivalist generation\, he challenged his compatriots to approach modern Irish identity in terms complementary rather than exclusivist. In the process of doing so\, he produced a corpus of literary essays European in stature\, informed by extensive travel\, deep reading\, and an active engagement with the political and social upheavals of his age. His insistence on the necessity of Protestant participation in Irish life\, coupled with his challenges to received Catholic opinion\, made him a contentious figure on both sides of the sectarian divide. \nThis study therefore seeks to address not only Butler’s remarkable personal career but also some of the larger themes to which he consistently drew attention: the need to balance Irish cosmopolitanism with local relationships; to address the compromises of the Second World War and the hypocrisies of the Cold War; to promote a society in which constructive dissent might not just be tolerated but valued. As a result\, by the end of his life Butler came to be recognized as a forerunner of the more tolerant and expansive Ireland of today. \nSpeaker:\n\nRev. Robert Tobin\nRobert Tobin was raised in Boston and Texas and took his first degree in English from Harvard. After graduation\, he taught school in South Africa and backpacked from Cape Town to Cairo. Awarded a Fulbright Scholarship\, he went on to take his M.Phil in Anglo-Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin\, studying with Professor Terence Brown. He then went to Merton College Oxford to pursue doctoral research under the supervision of Professor R.F. Foster. Having completed his D. Phil.\, he spent three years at Cambridge studying for ordination in the Church of England\, after which he served as a curate in Buckinghamshire and as the Episcopal/Anglican Chaplain at Harvard. Currently he serves as Chaplain and Tutor at Oriel College Oxford. His book\, The Minority Voice: Hubert Butler and Southern Irish Protestantism\, 1900-91 appeared in the Oxford Historical Monographs series in 2012. He is now pursuing research on the social transformation of the American Episcopal Church in the 1960s. Follow the link for information about Butler and the recent Notting Hill edition of his European Essays. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/hubert-butler-28-feb/ LOCATION:The Doubletree by Hilton\, 2 Bridge Place\, Victoria\, London\, SWIV 1QA\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,lecture,politics,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/butler-1.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR