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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171114T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171114T200000
DTSTAMP:20260527T001539
CREATED:20171023T130146Z
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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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171030T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171030T203000
DTSTAMP:20260527T001539
CREATED:20170903T131534Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180117T005153Z
UID:9456-1509391800-1509395400@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Writing Gay Irish Lives - 30 Oct
DESCRIPTION:In light of social and legal changes in Ireland over recent years the ILS is drawing together Irish writers to consider the representation of queer people in Irish literature. Our panel will be reflecting on London as a place of escape\, queer representation in Irish writing\, homosexuality in the discourse of what constitutes Irishness\, and the integration of queer characters and narratives into the wider culture. Here in London the 50-year anniversary since it stopped being illegal for two men (criminal law\, until Section 28\, targeted only men) to be in a relationship in England and Wales has been widely celebrated\, the law changed in Scotland and Northern Ireland later – not until 1993 was same-sex sexual activity decriminalised in Ireland. Historically many Irish queer people felt compelled to emigrate in search of a more supportive social climate\, the attraction of London was obvious as a metropolitan centre associated with tolerance of sexual diversity and established queer communities. Yet now Ireland now has gay marriage (passed by 62% vote share)\, a young\, openly gay taoiseach and progressive trans recognition legislation – the influence of Catholic dogma has clearly waned. The rich and varied work of our panel will be discussed in the context of these changes and each writer will read from their work.  \nSpeakers:\n\nDr Michael G Cronin\nMichael G Cronin is a Lecturer in English\, specialising in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish literature and in sexuality studies. He received his MA from the University of Sussex\, having studied on the renowned Sexual Dissidence and Cultural Change programme. He subsequently completed a doctorate on the twentieth-century Irish Catholic bildungsroman at Maynooth University\, where he was an IRCHSS Government of Ireland scholar.  Along with Impure Thoughts\, he has published essays on twentieth-century and contemporary Irish fiction\, and on contemporary Irish sexual politics.  He was Guest Editor of a special issue of Irish Review (Irish Review 46\, Autumn 2013) on Irish Studies in the wake of the 2008 crash. He is currently working on a project provisionally entitled ‘Revolutionary Bodies: homoeroticism and the political imagination in Irish writing’.  \n\nMary Dorcey – UNFORTUNATELY MARY WILL NOT NOW BE ABLE TO APPEAR AT THIS EVENT\, 30 OCT\nThe critically acclaimed poet\, short story writer and novelist\, Mary Dorcey was born in County Dublin\, Ireland. She is a member by peer election of ‘Aosdana’ the Irish Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1990 she won the Rooney Prize for Literature for her short story collection: ‘A Noise from the Woodshed.’ Her bestselling novel Biography of Desire (Poolbeg) was published in September of 1997 to critical acclaim and reprinted three times. She was writer in residence at Trinity College for the Centre for Gender and Women’s Studies for ten years where she gives seminars in contemporary English literature and taught a creative writing course. She also taught for four years at University College Dublin. Dorcey’s most recent collection is Perhaps the Heart is Constant after All. (Salmon Poetry. October 2012) \n\nBarry McCrea\nThe Chair of our panel is Barry McCrea\, a novelist and scholar of modern European\, Latin American\, and Irish literature. He most recent book is Languages of the Night: Minor Languages and the Literary Imagination in Twentieth-Century Ireland and Europe (Yale University Press\, 2015)\, which won the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016. He is the author of The First Verse\, a novel\, winner of a number of awards including the 2006 Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes and Noble “Discover” prize\, and of In the Company of Strangers: Narrative and Family in Dickens\, Conan Doyle\, Joyce and Proust (Columbia University Press\, 2011)\, which won the Yale Heyman Prize for scholarship in the humanities.Professor McCrea holds has a BA in Romance languages from Trinity College Dublin\, and a PhD in comparative literature from Princeton. Before joining Notre Dame\, he taught comparative literature at Yale University\, where he was appointed full professor in 2012. Professor McCrea teaches fall semesters in the Rome and Dublin Global Gateways and spring semesters on campus. \n\nJamie O’Neill\nJamie O’Neill was born in Dún Laoghaire in 1962. He left for England at the age of 17 and lived and worked in England for two decades\, he now lives in Galway. His first novel\, Disturbance\, was published in 1989 and followed by Kilbrack in 1990. Thereafter O’Neill struggled to write and on parting company with both his agent and publisher he took the job as a night porter at the Cassell Hospital\, a psychiatric institution in Surrey from 1990 up to 2000. His critically-acclaimed novel\, At Swim\, Two Boys (2001) earned him the highest advance ever paid for an Irish novel and frequent claims that he was the natural successor to James Joyce\, Flann O’Brien and Samuel Beckett. At Swim\, Two Boys was re-issued this year to mark the 50th anniversary of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. The novel describes a burgeoning love between two teenage boys\, Jim Mack and Doyler\, childhood friends – “cara macree\, pal o’ my heart” – in the early years of the 20th century in Dublin. They meet again some years later in a flute band as 15-year old Doyler teaches Jim to swim. They make a pact – on Easter Sunday 1916\, they will swim to Muglin’s Rock to claim it for themselves and for Ireland.  \n\nCherry Smyth\nCherry Smyth is a poet\, novelist and art critic. Her first poetry collection When the Lights Go Up (Lagan Press\, 2001) traces her move from Ireland to London and the negotiations of identity required in a new country. One Wanted Thing (Lagan Press\, 2006)\, her second volume\, is less concerned with loss than with a buoyant affirmation of love\, acceptance and the wider issues of the fall-out of events like 9/11 and 7/7: how these changed our world-view. In Test\, Orange (Pindrop Press\, 2012)\, she brings together a range of poetic forms from haiku to longer free-verse poems dealing with things we face in a female body. In 2000–01\, Cherry was writer-in-residence in a women’s prison and published their extraordinary work in A Strong Voice in a Small Space (Cherry Picking Press\, 2002)\, which won the Raymond Williams community-publishing prize in 2003. She has been teaching writing poetry in the Creative Writing Department of the University of Greenwich since 2004. She was appointed a Royal Literary Fellow\, 2014-2016. Her novel Hold Still (Holland Park Press\, 2013) charts the role of Irish woman Jo Hiffernan as muse to both Whistler and Courbet. \nSpread the word:
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/writing-gay-lives/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:book signing,exile,history,interview,novel,poetry,politics,Reading,social history,tradition
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170626T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000
DTSTAMP:20260527T001539
CREATED:20170418T182200Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T225429Z
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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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20141030T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20141030T203000
DTSTAMP:20260527T001539
CREATED:20161006T185220Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234856Z
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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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20140227T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20140227T210000
DTSTAMP:20260527T001539
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20130228T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20130228T203000
DTSTAMP:20260527T001539
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
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