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 END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VTIMEZONE TZID:UTC BEGIN:STANDARD TZOFFSETFROM:+0000 TZOFFSETTO:+0000 TZNAME:UTC DTSTART:20160101T000000 END:STANDARD END:VTIMEZONE BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20220328T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20220328T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20220215T121744Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220323T131047Z UID:18834-1648495800-1648501200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:'Nora' with Nuala O'Connor - 28 March DESCRIPTION:In this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses we are delighted to welcome Nuala O’Connor to the Society to discuss her novel Nora. When Nora Barnacle\, a twenty-year-old from Galway working as a maid at Finn’s Hotel\, meets young James Joyce on a summer’s day in Dublin\, she is instantly attracted to him\, natural and daring in his company. But she cannot yet imagine the extraordinary life they will share together. All Nora knows is that she likes her Jim enough to leave behind family and home\, in search of more. Nora is a tour de force\, an earthy and authentic love letter to Irish literature’s greatest muse. The novel conjures up a portrait of Nora Barnacle from her first meeting with James Joyce\, through her years in Dublin and later across Europe. It thus follows the Joyces as Nora is increasingly torn between their intense and unwavering desire for each other\, and the constant anxiety of living hand to mouth\, often made worse by her husband’s compulsion for company and attention A lively and loving paean to the indomitable Nora Barnacle.Edna O'Brien Nuala O’Connor will be in conversation with David Collard whose own Joycean musings ‘Multiple Joyce‘ will be published in June and feature as part of our Bloomsday celebrations. Joining them will be soprano Angela Hicks and guitarist Tom Gamble with songs of the period.An exceptional novel by one of the most brilliant contemporary Irish writers\, this is a story of love in all its many seasons\, from ardent sexuality to companionable tenderness\, through strength\, challenge and courage.Joseph O'Connor The ILS is partnering again with One Dublin One Book\, the excellent Dublin City Council initiative\, led by Dublin City Libraries\, which encourages everyone to read a book connected with the capital city during the month of April every year. We are delighted to extend the reach of the project to London. The event will be followed by a booksale and signing. \n  \n\nSpeaker: Nuala O’Connor\n\n\n \nNuala O’Connor was born in Dublin\, Ireland\, in 1970. A graduate of Trinity College Dublin\, she is a novelist and short story writer and lives in County Galway with her husband and three children. Nuala has won many prizes for her short fiction including the Short Story Prize in the UK and Ireland’s Francis MacManus Award. She is editor at flash e-zine Splonk. Nora is her fifth novel\, she is also the author of several short story and poetry collections. \n\n\n\nSpeaker: David Collard David Collard is a London-based writer\, reviewer\, researcher\, editor and occasional broadcaster\, appearing regularly in the Times Literary Supplement\, Literary Review and elsewhere\, in print and online. His forthcoming book is Multiple Joyce: 100 short essays about James Joyce’s cultural legacy (Sagging Meniscus Press\, June 2022) Read an excerpt on RTÉ. \n\n\n\nGuitar: Tom Gamble A keen advocate for collaboration\, Tom has worked and performed with musicians as diverse as Duke Alexander\, David Knopfler\, Angela Hicks\, The Boston Sinfonia and The London Philharmonic. Tom has released three solo albums\, each to their own critical acclaim\, and has been featured numerous times on BBC Radio 3. As a live performer\, Tom is known not only for his genre-bending shows\, but also for his friendly spoken introductions to the music. \n\n\n\nSoprano: Angela Hicks Lancastrian soprano ANGELA HICKS is a versatile singer\, experienced in opera\, oratorio\, theatre\, medieval\, renaissance\, chamber music and recitals with organ\, piano and lute. Since embarking on her musical career\, she has performed internationally\, and has established herself as a specialist in the baroque repertoire.  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/nora-with-nuala-oconnor-28-march/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,feminism,novel,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/nora-slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20211115T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 CREATED:20211014T104732Z LAST-MODIFIED:20211018T120253Z UID:18417-1635190200-1635195600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Gail McConnell and Stephen Sexton - 25 October DESCRIPTION:  \n\n\n\nTo kick off the 2021 ILS season and welcome everyone back to physically present meetings we are delighted to be at the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith to give a London launch to two new poetry volumes from Stephen Sexton and Gail McConnell. We’ll also be featuring the Irish Poets in the UK edition of the Agenda poetry magazine with a reading from John O’Donoghue. \nGail McConnell joins us to read from her new collection The Sun is Open (Penned in the Margins\, 2021). Her book pieces through a boxed archive of public and private materials related to the life and death of her father\, who was murdered by the IRA outside their Belfast home in 1984. Flitting between a child and adult self\, this startling\, innovative debut charts the experience of going through the box\, as the poems attempt to decode the past and present\, and piece together a history\, and a life. Our President\, Bernard O’Donoghue\, comments: ‘She is now one of the crucial public writers.’  \n\n‘The Sun is Open employs a grammar in which everything is significant\, from Wendy Houses\, to the very hairs of your head\, to the poetry of First Aid instructions\, to slaters. This is meticulous and painstaking — sometimes pain-making work — making the words fit the columns\, be they inches of newsprint or entries in an Account Book\, negotiating or nudging the meanings into alternative senses.’ CIARAN CARSON \n\n   \n\nHis pen is fantastical. Cheryl (of the title)\, tarot card clairvoyant\, is conjured out of thin air. She flourishes alongside many other sleights of hand and vanishing acts: there is no knot Sexton cannot slip… many of his phrases are so good I wanted to steal them…Sexton makes the world bearable with poetry as his intercessor. KATE KELLAWAY\, The Observer. \n\n\nStephen Sexton joins us to read from his new collection Cheryl’s Destinies (Penguin\, 2021). It is the decade of centuries\, and Cheryl tells us our fortune. Radicals liberate a zoo\, teenagers flirt in a bowling alley\, and the dead are cherished. In these inventive\, playful\, dream-like poems\, Stephen Sexton takes us on a journey through the past and the present\, while Cheryl translates from the future\, showing us how we exist in all three at once. Reckoning with both public and private tragedies\, the book is divided into three parts. In Part One\, the poems range across old Europe: ‘Edelweiss’ and Titanic setting sail\, to a transatlantic\, cross-century symposium in Part Two\, where two giants perfect their arts in collaboration. In Part Three we are back in the land where the past keeps breaking through\, it’s practically always the anniversary of something terrible\, but there’s always Cheryl in the moonlight and her deck of tarot cards. A thrillingly strange exploration of the comfort of the fantastical when the real is hard to bear\, Cheryl’s Destinies is the enchanting follow-up to the Forward Prize for Best First Collection-winning If All the World and Love Were Young\, by one of the most exciting young poets writing today. \n\n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n\nSpeaker: Gail McConnell\n\n\n \nGail McConnell is a writer and critic from Belfast. She is the author of two poetry pamphlets: Fothermather (Ink Sweat & Tears\, 2019) and Fourteen (Green Bottle Press\, 2018). A programme based on Fothermather was produced by Conor Garrett for Radio 4 in 2020 and made available as a Seriously… podcast. Gail’s poems have appeared in Poetry Review\, PN Review\, Virginia Quarterly Review\, Blackbox Manifold and Stand\, and she is the recipient of two awards from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. She is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University Belfast and the author of Northern Irish Poetry and Theology (Palgrave\, 2014). Gail’s writing interests include violence\, creatureliness\, queerness and the possibilities and politics of language and form. \nSpeaker: Stephen Sexton\n\n\n \nStephen Sexton’s first book\, If All the World and Love Were Young was the winner of the Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2019 and the Shine / Strong Award for Best First Collection. He was awarded the E.M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2020. He was the winner of the National Poetry Competition in 2016 and the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award in 2018. He teaches at the Seamus Heaney Centre at Queen’s University\, Belfast. \n \nSpeaker: John O’Donoghue\n\n\n \nJohn O’Donoghue is the author of a memoir Sectioned: A Life Interrupted (John Murray 2009) which was awarded Mind Book Of The Year in 2010. His poetry collections include Letter To Lord Rochester (Waterloo Press\, 2004); The Beach Generation (Pighog Press\, 2007); and Brunch Poems (Waterloo Press\, 2009). John lives in Brighton and teaches Creative Writing. He will be reading from his work in the ‘Irish Poets in the UK’ edition of Agenda. \nChair: James Conor Patterson\n\n\n \nJames Conor Patterson is the editor of the upcoming anthology The New Frontier: Reflections from the Irish Border (New Island Books\, 2021) which will be the focus of our 15 November event. He is also author of the poetry collection ‘Bandit Country’ forthcoming from Picador in Autumn 2022. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Guardian\, i-D\, The Irish Times\, Magma\, The Moth\, Morning Star\, New Statesman\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Poetry London\, Poetry Review\, RTÉ Culture\, The Stinging Fly and The Tangerine\, among others. \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/gail-mcconnell-and-stephen-sexton-25-october/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Belfast,biography,book signing,crime,documentary,poetry,politics,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/mcconnel-sexton-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20210624T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20210624T193000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20210616T215934Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210616T233735Z UID:18272-1624563000-1624563000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:A History of Irish Women's Poetry - 24 June DESCRIPTION:Join us to celebrate the launch of a new collection of essays reflecting on the history of Irish women’s poetry with the editors Ailbhe Darcy and David Wheatley. The new Cambridge University Press volume offers a ground-breaking and comprehensive account of Irish women’s poetry from earliest times to the present day. Joining the editors will be the poet Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\, one of the major Irish poets writing over the past 50 years\, and the author of the chapter on her work\, the academic Maria Johnston. \n\nThe editors\, both literary scholars and award-winning poets in their own right\, will discuss their shaping the volume and its reading of Irish women’s poetry through many prisms – mythology\, gender\, history\, the nation – and most importantly\, close readings of the poetry itself. It covers major figures\, such as Maire Mhac an tSaoi\, Eavan Boland\, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain\, as well as neglected figures from the past. Writing in both English and Irish is considered\, and close attention paid to the many different contexts in which Irish women’s poetry has been produced and received\, from the anonymous work of the early modern period\, through the bardic age\, the coterie poets of Anglo-Ireland\, the nationalist balladeers of Young Ireland\, the Irish Literary Revival\, and the advent of modernity. The volume and our event seeks to give an answer to the question posed by Ní Chuilleanáin in an essay on Speranza from 2000: ‘what use our female predecessors are to us as writers\, what is the function of model\, teacher\, exemplar?’ \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\n\n\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson\, she was a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week. \n\nSpeaker: Ailbhe Darcy\n\n\n \nDr Ailbhe Darcy’s most recent collection of poetry is Insistence\, published in June 2018 with Bloodaxe Books\, which won Wales Book of the Year and the Piggott Prize for Poetry in association with Listowel Writers’ Week. Her previous collection with Bloodaxe are Imaginary Menagerie (2011). A poetic text in collaboration with S.J. Fowler\, Subcritical Tests (2017)\, published by Gorse Editions\, and a chapbook\, A Fictional Dress (2009)\, published by Tall Lighthouse. In February 2020 she presented Alphabet on BBC Radio 4\, a programme about Inger Christensen’s extraordinary poem alfabet and its resonance in the age of climate change\, produced by Megan Jones. Darcy is a Senior Lecturer at Cardiff University. \n\nSpeaker: Maria Johnston\n\n\n \nDr. Maria Johnston received her Doctorate in English Literature in 2007 and has since worked as a Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin\, the Mater Dei Institute (DCU) and Oxford University. She is a well-known poetry critic and her reviews and essays have appeared in a range of publications including the Guardian\, Poetry Ireland Review\, Edinburgh Review\, The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry and The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry. She is the co-editor of Reading Pearse Hutchinson (Irish Academic Press\, 2011) and is currently working on a book on contemporary Irish poetry. Her recent archival discoveries on the poet Ethna McCarthy were featured in the Irish Times.\n\n\nSpeaker: David Wheatley\n Wheatley is a poet and critic whose most recent poetry collection is The President of Planet Earth (Carcanet/Wake Forest UP\, 2017). He has published four previous collections with Gallery Press: Thirst (1997; Rooney Prize for Irish Literature)\, Misery Hill (2000)\, Mocker (2006)\, and A Nest on the Waves (2010). Wheatley’s critical work has appeared in numerous edited collections\, including The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012)\, The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (2013)\, The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (2013). He was a founding editor of the poetry journal Metre\, and has written on poetry for a variety of other journals. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/a-history-of-irish-womens-poetry-24-june/ CATEGORIES:biography,feminism,Irish language,poetry,publishing,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/banner-crowdcast-Irish-women.png LOCATION:https://www.crowdcast.io/e/a-history-of-irish-womens-poetry END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20210201T210000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20210201T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20210201T203041Z LAST-MODIFIED:20210201T224044Z UID:18124-1612213200-1612213200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Days of Clear Light - 1 Feb 2021 DESCRIPTION:We are delighted to join with our friends to mark the occasion of 40 years of Salmon Poetry and to celebrate the work of Jessie Lendennie. To mark that achievement 100 writers have come together in contributing to a special Festschrift presented as a complete surprise to Jessie at Christmas 2020. Editor Nessa O’Mahony interviews Jessie for the ILS and a number of the poets have contributed recordings of their poems for this online celebration. \n\nThe marvellous Festschrift\, so assiduously shaped in secret by our friends the editors Alan Hayes and Nessa O’Mahony\, gathers together poetry\, prose and memoir\, full of love\, gratitude and acknowledgement of the central role Jessie and Salmon have played in Irish literature. The President of Ireland Michael D Higgins writes in the foreward of Salmon publishing his first volume of poetry\, The Betrayal back in 1990 and notes of Jessie’s grá for experimentalism: ‘For Jessie\, the world of publishing has always been a space of offering new possibilities and exciting opportunities. In exercising choice on what to publish she has been unafraid to take a risk\, to follow her heart and her instinct down roads untravelled. In doing so she has also brought many readers down new pathways\, introducing them to remarkable writers who may have remained undiscovered or ‘off the beaten track’ if it were not for Jessie.’ Alan Hayes in his introduction writes of the transformative effect of Salmon’s redress of the gender imbalance in Irish publishing\, his work at Arlen House also deserves great credit in publishing and reviving Irish women poets. The quality of the collections which stream from Salmon today stand up to the great work of Eva Bourke and Rita Ann Higgins on which the Press was founded. Alan quotes the late Eavan Boland writing of Salmon as “one of the most innovative\, perceptive and important publishing houses in the UK and Ireland. It has fostered and supported the work of new writers and has established them in the public consciousness.” The book is available from Salmon.\n\nEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin is first up and reads for us from her poem In Ostia\, then Nessa O’Mahony joins Jessie in conversation and some of the poets from the volume have recorded their readings to share with us\, we’re delighted to have Gerry Dawe\, Martina Evans\, Jane Clarke and Nessa reading their work. Brava Jessie\, happy anniversary Salmon!\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nEiléan Ní Chuilleanáin\nBorn 1942 in Cork\, she is an Emeritus Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin\, where she has taught\, researched and written on Renaissance literature and translation\, since 1966; with her husband Macdara Woods\, Leland Bardwell and Pearse Hutchinson\, she was a founder and (since 1975) co-editor of the Irish poetry journal Cyphers. Her seventh collection of poetry\, The Sun-Fish\, was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize and won the Griffin International Prize for poetry in 2010; The Boys of Bluehill was published in 2015 by Gallery Press\, and was shortlisted for the Forward Prize\, the Irish Times Poetry Now Award and the Pigott Prize at the Listowel Writers’ Week.\n\nSpeaker: Jane Clarke\n\n\n \nJane Clarke is the author of two poetry collections\, The River and When the Tree Falls (Bloodaxe Books 2015 & 2019)\, and an illustrated chapbook\, All the Way Home\, (Smith|Doorstop 2019). She grew up on a farm in Co. Roscommon and her work explores enduring connections to people\, place and nature. Jane’s awards include the 2016 Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and the 2016 Listowel Writers’ Week Poem of the Year. She now lives in Glenmalure\, Co. Wicklow where she combines writing with teaching & mentoring creative writing. www.janeclarkepoetry.ie \n\nSpeaker: Gerald Dawe\n\n\n\nGerald Dawe is a retired Professor of English and Fellow of Trinity College\, Dublin. He has published eight collections of poetry and several volumes of essays\, and he is the recipient of numerous awards and honours\, including the Macaulay Fellowship in Literature. His latest poetry collection Mickey Finn’s Air\, was published in 2014; Of War and War’s Alarms: Reflections on Modern Irish Writing appeared in 2015. In Another World is available from online retailers and the Irish Academic Press. \n\n\nSpeaker: Martina Evans\n Martina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Her latest collection Now We Can Talk Openly About Men was published by Carcanet in May 2018. It featured in the Times Literary Supplement\, Observer and Irish Times Books of the Year and has been shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award as well as the Pigott Poetry Award. Currently she is Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and poetry reviewer for the Irish Times. \n\n\nChair: Nessa O’Mahony\n\n\n\nNessa O’Mahony is a Dublin-born poet and novelist. She has published four books of poetry – Bar Talk (1999)\, Trapping a Ghost (2005)\, In Sight of Home (2009) and Her Father’s Daughter (2014). She is co-editor with Siobhán Campbell of Eavan Boland: Inside History (Arlen House\, 2016). Her first novel\, The Branchman (Arlen House\, 2018) was recently published. O’Mahony won the National Women’s Poetry Competition in 1997 and was shortlisted for the Patrick Kavanagh Prize and Hennessy Literature Awards.. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/days-of-clear-light-1-feb-2021/ CATEGORIES:feminism,film,poetry,publishing,Reading,women LOCATION: END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200427T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20200126T204729Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200404T103549Z UID:16823-1588015800-1588021200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Moth\, 10th Anniversary - POSTPONED DESCRIPTION:THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. \nJoin the Society to celebrate the 10th birthday of The Moth\, one of Ireland’s foremost art and literature magazines. Founded in 2010 by Rebecca O’Connor and Will Govan\, The Moth features poetry\, short fiction and art by established and up-and-coming writers and artists. Each issue also hosts two interviews – with writers such as Sally Rooney\, Sharon Olds\, Colm Toibin and Paul Muldoon. They also publish The Caterpillar and run several art and literary prizes\, including one of the biggest prizes in the world for a single poem. \n  \nWill and Rebecca will regale you with stories about The Moth\, which they run from their home in rural Ireland\, and will be joined by a stellar line-up of past contributors including the novelist Thomas Maloney\, former Moth Poetry Prizewinners Ann Gray and Abigail Parry\, the winner of The Moth Short Story Prize 2019 Conor Crummey\, and newcomers Mark Lawlor and Bryony Littlefair (who recently won a Moth Retreat Bursary). \n\n ‘Exquisitely designed and choc-a-bloc with exciting new artworks and wordworks.’Paul Durcan‘If you want to keep your finger on the pulse\, The Moth magazine is all you need.’Christine Dwyer Hickey \n  \nCopies of The Moth will be available for sale at the event. \n  \nSpeaker: Conor Crummey\n\n\n \nConor Crummey’s story ‘Journeys’ was chosen by author Kit de Waal as the winner of the €3\,000 Moth Short Story Prize 2019. Crummey\, from Belfast\, now lives in London\, where he is a lecturer in public law at Queen Mary University of London. Follow Conor on twitter: @ConorCrummey \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Will Govan\n \n\n\n \nWill Govan is co-founder and director of The Moth. He studied portraiture at The Heatherley School of Fine Art in London and paints at The Moth Studios in Cavan Town in Ireland. He had his first solo exhibition\, Shark With Plunger & Other Paintings\, at the Johnston Central Library in Cavan in July 2019 Follow Will on twitter: @WillGovan1 \n  \nSpeaker: Ann Gray\n \n\n\n \nThe author of a number of collections including Painting Skin (Fatchance Press\, 1995) and The Man I Was Promised (Headland\, 2004)\, Ann was commended for the National Poetry Competition 2010 and won the Ballymaloe Poetry Prize in 2014. \n  \nSpeaker: Bryony Littlefair\n\n\n \nBryony Littlefair is a poet and workshop facilitator living in South London. Her pamphlet Giraffe won the Mslexia Pamphlet Prize in 2017 and is out now with Seren Books. She was shortlisted for the inaugural Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize in 2018 and in 2019 received the Moth Retreat Bursary Award. Follow Bryony on twitter: @B_Littlefair \n  \n \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Thomas Maloney\n\n\n \nThomas Maloney was born in Kent in 1979\, grew up in London\, and studied Physics at Oxford. His first novel\, The Sacred Combe\, was published in 2016. He lives in Oxfordshire with his family. \n  \n  \nSpeaker: Rebecca O’Connor\n\n\n \nRebecca is co-founder and director of The Moth. She edits and designs The Moth and The Caterpillar. Her debut poetry collection We’ll Sing Blackbird was shortlisted for the Strong Shine Award and she is a recipient of a Geoffrey Dearmer Prize from Poetry Review. Her debut novel He Is Mine and I Have No Other was published by Canongate in 2018. Follow Rebecca on twitter: @RebeccaMoth \n  \nSpeaker: Abigail Parry\n\nAbigail Parry spent seven years as a toymaker before completing her doctoral thesis on wordplay. She has won a number of prizes and awards for her work\, including the Ballymaloe Prize\, the Troubadour Prize\, and an Eric Gregory Award. Her first collection\, Jinx\, published by Bloodaxe in 2018\, was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection 2018 and the Seamus Heaney Centre First Collection Poetry Prize 2019. Follow Abigail on twitter: @ginpitnancy \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-moth-10th-anniversary-27-april/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:anniversary,art,Collaboration,history,interview,poetry,Reading,short story,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/moth-slider.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200224T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 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=Europe/London:20200127T193000 DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20200127T203000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20200117T115551Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200203T161543Z UID:16281-1580153400-1580157000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Female Detective - 27 Jan DESCRIPTION:As we approach St Brigid’s Day we are delighted to welcome an all-female panel to an event considering the continuing popularity of Irish crime writing\, so-called “Emerald Noir”. Our guests will read from their work\, reflect on their portrayal of female detectives and as all three are UK-based we’ll consider their London and Dublin settings. In Maeve Kerrigan (Casey)\, Bridie Devine (Kidd) and Frankie Sheehan (Kiernan) we have three brilliantly drawn female detectives overcoming obstacles and prejudice. \nHow do we account for the huge growth in popularity of Irish crime writing\, is it connected to peace in Northern Ireland\, the economic collapse from 2008? Is generic labelling useful or does it signal a lack of appreciation of the quality of writing? Join our panel for an evening of readings and discussion on their work\, influences and perspectives on the crime fiction genre. \n\n ‘One of the most thoroughly human and convincing police officers in the fictional ranks’ The Guardian on Jane Casey’s Maeve Kerrigan. \n‘Thrilling\, mysterious\, twisted’ Graham Norton on Jess Kidd’s Things in Jars \n‘Olivia Kiernan writes with a rare mastery . . . A total triumph’ Rachel Edwards\, on Olivia Kiernan’s The Killer in Me \n\n  \n\n\n \n The event will be followed by a sale and signing of books. \n  \n \nChair: Katherine Armstrong\n\n\n \nKatherine Armstrong has worked in publishing for over fifteen years and is currently Editorial Director for Fiction at Bonnier Books UK. She has previously worked at Faber & Faber and Little\, Brown. Her speciality is crime and thriller fiction. She was one of the founding organisers of First Monday Crime Nights in London and is programme consultant for NOIReland\, a new international crime fiction festival in Belfast. Follow Katherine on twitter: @katherinecrime \n  \nSpeaker: Jane Casey\n\n\n \nCrime is a family affair for Jane Casey. Married to a criminal barrister\, she has a unique insight into the brutal underbelly of urban life\, from the smell of a police cell to the darkest motives of a serial killer. This gritty realism has made her books international bestsellers and critical successes; while Detective Maeve Kerrigan has quickly become one of the most popular characters in crime fiction. Winner of the Mary Higgins Clark Award for THE STRANGER YOU KNOW\, Jane also won The Irish Independent Crime Fiction Book of the Year 2019 for CRUEL ACTS. Her new Maeve Kerrigan novel THE CUTTING PLACE is publishing in April. Jane is also a member of Killer Women. Follow Jane on twitter: @JaneCaseyAuthor \n  \n \n \nSpeaker: Jess Kidd\n\n\n \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 Things in Jars came out 4 April 2019 and features 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 will be published in June 2020. Follow Jess on twitter: @JessKiddHerself \n  \nSpeaker: Olivia Kiernan Olivia Kiernan is an Irish writer. In a previous life\, she completed a diploma in anatomy and physiology then a BSc in Chiropractic before she succumbed to the creative itch and embarked on an MA in Creative writing. In 2015\, she began writing Too Close to Breathe\, a crime thriller that was published in 2018 and features Dublin detective\, Frankie Sheehan. The second in the series\, The Killer in Me was published April 2019. Follow Olivia on twitter: @LivKiernan. \n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-female-detective-27-jan/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:crime,exile,feminism,London-Irish,novel,Reading,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/png:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/female-detective_2.png END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191125T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191125T203000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20190915T181936Z LAST-MODIFIED:20200203T214611Z UID:12390-1574710200-1574713800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Polly Devlin\, Writing Home - 25 Nov DESCRIPTION:Polly Devlin joins Joan Bakewell to discuss the latest collection of her work\, Writing Home\, and to reflect on a rich career as a writer\, her working as features editor of Vogue in London in the Swinging Sixties\, to encounters with Bob Dylan\, Janis Joplin\, Barbara Streisand\, John Lennon…In the pieces brought together in Writing Home\, Polly Devlin OBE\, covers subjects that range over her whole life and thought. She writes about places: about her childhood deep in the countryside of Northern Ireland (where\, in the late 1950s\, the first electricity poles looked ‘literally out of place’); her sudden transition\, at the age of twenty-one\, to Swinging Sixties London\, where she worked for Vogue and became very much part of the scene (although – ‘it’s like being a provincial at Versailles’)\, on to New York\, back to London\, then to the English countryside\, and to Paris\, Venice\, the world over – and always back to Ireland\, London and New York. \nShe writes about the people she has known\, among them Yoko Ono\, Mick Jagger\, Peggy Guggenheim\, Diana Vreeland (‘as fantastical as a unicorn’)\, Jean Shrimpton (‘she looks as though she sleeps in cathedral pews and sucks artichoke hearts for sustenance’)\, Princess Margaret (who came to dinner and did the washing up\, ‘which I gabbled she didn’t need to – she looked at me frostily and the royal hands went back into the Fairy Liquid’). And she writes about the issues that have preoccupied her: about emigration\, feminism (‘I grew up in a society where men were fundamental and women were secondary’)\, reading\, writing\, collecting\, shopping\, houses\, dogs\, rooks\, hares\, dreams\, friendship and the kindness of strangers; about daughters and mothers. \n \n \n\n“…affectionate sketches of friends including Nuala O’Faolain and her brother-in-law Seamus Heaney…ring with truth and tenderness.”Irish Times\n\nThe event will be followed by a book sale and signing by the author. \n  \nOur thanks to the publishers of Writing Home: \n  \n\nSpeaker: Joan Bakewell\n\n\nJoan Bakewell has a distinguished career as an author\, journalist and broadcaster. She has served on the board of the National Theatre and as Chair of the British Film Institute and of the National Campaign for the Arts. Joan was made a CBE is 1999 and Dame in 2008. In January 2011 she took her seat in the House of Lords as Baroness Bakewell of Stockport. In April 2013\, she became President of Birkbeck College.She has led some of the BBC’s most well-remembered documentaries and news programmes\, challenging taboos around sex; examining religion from a critical\, objective standpoint; and being a champion for arts and culture and their relevance to life. \n\n  \nSpeaker: Polly Devlin\n\n\nPolly Devlin is a writer\, broadcaster and filmmaker. She holds an OBE for services to literature. After spending her childhood in Northern Ireland\, at the age of twenty-two she took up her first job – as a writer\, and soon features editor\, on British Vogue\, at the heart of 1960s London. A couple of years later she was again transported\, to New York\, to work for Diana Vreeland on American Vogue – where\, once more\, she was very much part of the scene she wrote about in her newspaper column and articles including for The Sunday Times\, New Statesman and Observer. Her first book\, All of Us There\, is now a Virago Modern Classic. The most recent\, New York: Places to Write Home About (Pimpernel Press\, 2017; published in the United States by Gibbs Smith\, as New York: Behind Closed Doors) was greeted with delight on both sides of the Atlantic. She now divides her time between London and New York\, where\, until her recent retirement\, she taught Creative Non-Fiction at Barnard College\, Columbia University. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/polly-devlin-writing-home-25-nov/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,exile,feminism,interview,Reading,research,social history,women ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/polly-devlin-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191028T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191028T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20181029T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181029T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20180911T070122Z LAST-MODIFIED:20181112T135217Z UID:10758-1540841400-1540846800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Troubling the Classics - 29 Oct DESCRIPTION:For our October event we’re bringing together a poet\, a novelist and a dramatist to reflect on their work and its place in a rich seam of Irish literature inspired by the Greeks. The continuing interest of Irish writers in Greek and Latin classical literature as a model and source for inspiration is somewhat surprising given the almost complete disappearance of the teaching of classical languages in Irish schools over the last 50 years. Yet the myths and stories of the ancient world still fascinate audiences and our writers continue to deliver fresh interpretations which reflect on Irish society.  \n‘The violence lies in Carr’s language\, shocking and extraordinarily vivid: we almost hear the buzzing of carrion flies\, smell the stench of carnage.’The Times\nThe nationalist attempt to recover the native\, suppressed\, literary tradition of Ireland found a model in 5th century BCE Athenians and their reaching back to the foundational epics of Homer. From the 19th century Irish translations of Greek tragedy were tied up in a project of recovery of a bardic tradition; from Yeats to Heaney this poetic tradition continued and absorbed great figures of modern poetry like MacNeice\, Boland\, Mahon and Kennelly. More recently that tradition has broadened and our dramatists and novelists have found intriguing correspondences in form and culture with the Greeks e.g. Alan McMonagle’s novel Ithaca\, Theo Dorgan’s collections Orpheus and Greek\, Peter Fallon’s versions of Hesiod and of the Georgics of Virgil\, and Frank McGuinness’ startling new versions of Greek drama. Our three guests representing the dramatic\, poetic and prose novel forms will discuss their work and the appeal and relevance of ancient literature. ‘Part of the thrill is recognising the correspondences between the characters and Homer’s originals . . . the language is enough to keep you enthralled . . . Hughes’s achievement is to prove that Homer remains ignoble\, messy and horribly familiar — Guardian’The Guardian Marina Carr’s plays bring alive the Greek classics in a uniquely contemporary and Irish manner. In By the Bog of Cats she reconstructs Medea\, in her Hecuba she positions the Queen at the centre of a drama clearly intended as a corrective to Euripides\, who portrays Hecuba as an enraged avenger. Michael Hughes’s widely praised second novel Country transposes the Illiad to border country\, Northern Ireland\, post-ceasefire\, 1996. After a woman turns informer\, an IRA gang takes matters into its own hands and storms the local British army base. But there is a falling out between Pig\, the gang’s leader\, and the sniper\, Achill. Death and betrayal follow. The poet Peter McDonald’s has lately developed an interest in verse translation from Greek and in 2016 produced The Homeric Hymns (2016)\, a series of verse translations into different English forms\, along with detailed notes on the ancient Greek poems themselves. Speakers: Marina CarrOne of Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights whose poetic tragedies often reinterpret ancient myth and address violence and the place of women in Irish life. Across her great Midlands-set plays Carr creates a timeless version of Ireland\, replete with ghosts\, ill-fated women and tragic families. Throughout her work Carr’s engagement with myth and folktale can be read as a richly imaginative reflection on the development of Irish cultural identity. In 2017 Carr was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize. She is a lecturer in Dublin City University’s School of English. She is working on new plays for the Abbey and the Kiln Theatre in London\, the latter about Clytemnestra in the aftermath of the Trojan war will appear in 2019-2020 season. Dr Florence Impens (Chair)Dr Impens holds a PhD in English from Trinity College\, Dublin\, as well as MAs in French and in Irish Studies from Université Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3. Her book Classical Presences in Irish Poetry after 1960: The Answering Voice provides the first overview of classical presences in Anglophone Irish poetry after 1960. Focusing on classical presences in the work of Seamus Heaney\, Michael Longley\, Derek Mahon\, and Eavan Boland. She is the author notably of ‘Classics and Irish Poetry after 1960’ in the forthcoming 5th volume of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature (Kenneth Haynes Ed.)\, and of ‘Classical Roots’ in Seamus Heaney in Context (Geraldine Higgins Ed.)\, due out with Cambridge University Press. Michael HughesMichael Hughes grew up in Keady\, Co. Armagh\, and now lives in London. He attended St Patrick’s Grammar School in Armagh and read English at Corpus Christi College\, Oxford before training in theatre at the Jacques Lecoq School in Paris. He has worked for many years as an actor under the professional name Michael Colgan\, and he also teaches creative writing. His first novel\, The Countenance Divine\, was published by John Murray in 2016. His widely praised novel Country is published by Hodder & Stoughton and available now. Professor Peter McDonaldProfessor Peter McDonald (born 1962 in Belfast) is a poet\, Professor of English and Related Literature\, he holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church\, Oxford and is a Fellow of St Hugh’s College. He produced the modern edition of the Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice (2007). The focus of his research now is the editing of W.B. Yeats’s Complete Poems for the Longman Annotated Poets series. He has published six original volumes of poetry since 1989\, most recently Herne the Hunter (2016)\, and his Collected Poems were published in 2012. A signing of Michael Hughes’ Country and Peter McDonald’s The Homeric Hymns will follow the event. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/troubling-the-classics/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:Classics,Greek,history,Latin,novel,poetry,Reading,research,theatre,tradition,translation ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/troubling-classics_slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180924T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180924T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20180826T123843Z LAST-MODIFIED:20220909T192904Z UID:10552-1537817400-1537822800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:The Irish Way of Death - 24 Sept DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society opens its 2018-19 season with a meditation on death\, dying and our attitudes to mortality. In his book\, The Way We Die Now\, Dr. O’Mahony gives us a rare glimpse into the world of death and dying from the vantage point of a medical doctor. In My Father’s Wake Toolis writes of his coming-to-terms with the death of his father and brother and reflects on the denial of space for grief in the modern world. Of Toolis’ book Hugo Hamilton has written: “Toolis has written a profound book on the culture of grief and death\, placing the personal alongside the political in a vivid exploration of our ancient ways of coming together around the dead.” \n\n\n‘O’Mahony explores the idea of a good death in literature and philosophy\, and shows that reality is far more chaotic and unpleasant…A searingly honest and humane book that is challenging yet profoundly important.’P D Smith in The Guardian\n\n\n\nWhat have we lost in moving from the funeral rites of Achill to the medicalised procedure that most of us now experience of death? These rich accounts of care for the dying and dead offer a critique of the idea of a ‘good death’\, a reflection on the literary history of death and the role of the hospital as antechamber to the tomb. Henry James called death ‘the distinguished thing’\, but O’Mahony reminds us\, ‘death\, for most people\, is banal\, anticlimactic. The End is robbed of its significance by our new hospital rituals. Most people who die in hospitals do so after several days of syringe-driver induced oblivion.’ Book signing to follow discussion. \n\n  \n\nSpeaker: Kevin Toolis\n\n\n\nKevin Toolis is a writer and filmmaker. He has written for The Guardian\, the New York Times Magazine and The Observer and reported on conflicts in Africa\, Ireland and the Middle East. He is the author of an acclaimed chronicle of Ireland’s Troubles\, Rebel Hearts. As a filmmaker Toolis was nominated for an Emmy for his documentaries on suicide bombing in the Middle East and won a BAFTA for Best Single Drama for Complicit in 2014. His family have lived in the same oceanside village on Achill island for the last 250 years. \n\n\n\nSpeaker: Dr Seamus O’Mahony\n\n\n\nDr Seamus O’Mahony is a Consultant Gastroenterologist at Cork University Hospital and graduate of UCC. He has been a consultant physician since 1996\, and is a Fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians of London and Edinburgh. His has published extensively in the fields of endoscopy\, coeliac disease and inflammatory bowel disease\, and was awarded the MD in 1991. His current main academic interest is medical humanities\, and has written extensively in this field. He is associate editor for medical humanities of the Journal of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh\, and is a regular contributor to the Dublin Review of Books. \n\n\n\nChair: Prof Anthea Tinker\n\n\n\nAnthea Tinker has been Professor of Social Gerontology at King’s College London since 1988. She has been on the staff of three Universities and three Government Departments and has been a Consultant to the WHO\, EU and OECD. She has undertaken a wide range of research in the field of social policy specialising since 1974 in gerontology. She is the author or co-author of 32 books and over 300 articles and book chapters.  \n\n\n\n  URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-irish-way-of-death/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell St\, London\, WC1B 3NN\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:folklore,lecture,medical,Reading,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/irish-way-of-death-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180521T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180521T203000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20171212T194151Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180829T131846Z UID:9914-1526931000-1526934600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Border Walk: Garrett Carr and Iain Sinclair - 21 May DESCRIPTION:First this three-hundred-mile line demarcated counties\, then countries and will next be the frontier of the European Union. As the uncertain agreements and ‘statements of intent’ are confirmed and disavowed by the UK and EU representatives over the Irish border we look at the topography of this line on the map and consider the human geography of borderlands. Cartographer\, artist and writer Garrett Carr has in his book The Rule of the Land told the story of Ireland’s border and a created a portrait of its landscape and people. Carr will join in conversation with the writer and filmmaker Iain Sinclair whose work is rooted in London and lately within the influences of psychogeography.“Garrett Carr engages a mapmaker’s eye and a writer’s sensibility to create a great book” The Irish Times.\n\nWe pass here into another allegiance\,\nexpect new postage stamps\, new prices\, manifestoes\,\nand brace ourselves for the change. But the landscape does not alter;\nwe had already entered these mountains an hour ago.\nFrom The Frontier\, by John Hewitt 1962\n\nBoth writers have explored borderlands and those neglected blanks on the map that hide so much of our past\, the disconnect between mapped boundaries and shared experience. Sinclair’s fascinating and haunting book London Orbital recounts the year he spent walking around the M25 – the motorway that encircles London. Carr’s The Rule of the Land explores a fragile borderland\, with an uncertain future. By foot or canoe he followed the border closely. At night he camped out on the land. He visited architecture on the border\, forts and dykes as well as defensive buildings of the Troubles. His engagements those living on the frontier\, bring us the lived experience of the line on the map.\n‘Here in this brilliant\, crackling series of final walks through the London landscape\, he finds the dissolving identity of the city increasingly disconcerting.’ Review of The Last London in The Observer.\n\n\nSpeaker: Garrett Carr\n\nGarrett Carr was born in Donegal in 1975. He has previously published three Young Adult novels. A lecturer in Creative Writing at Queen’s University\, he lives in Belfast with his family. His research interests include writing about place\, history and memoir. He is also a map-maker and publishs academically on the topic of cartography. He holds an MA in Art History\, an MPhil in Geography and a PhD in Creative Writing. In his exhibition Mapping Alternative Ulster he brought together diverse mapmakers: local historians\, activists\, artists\, geographers and urban planners for a show of maps. See his website here: http://www.garrettcarr.net/\n\n\nSpeaker: Iain Sinclair\n\nIain Sinclair is the award-winning writer of numerous critically acclaimed books on London\, including Lights Out for the Territory\, London Orbital and London Overground. The son of a Welsh GP\, Sinclair studied in Dublin before moving to London with his wife. His early work was self-published\, and he worked as a teacher and labourer while researching occult aspects of the city’s past. He won the Encore Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for his novel Downriver. Sinclair has been documenting the peculiar magic of the river-city that absorbs and obsesses him for most of his adult life. He lives in Hackney\, East London. In his most recent book\, The Last London (2017)\, he strikes out on a series of solitary walks and collaborative expeditions to make a final reckoning with a capital stretched beyond recognition. See his website here: http://www.iainsinclair.org.uk/\n\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/border-walk-garrett-carr-and-iain-sinclair-21-may/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,cycling,history,interview,nature,Reading,social history,walking ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/border-walking.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180430T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180430T203000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20180116T231722Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180422T224539Z UID:10083-1525116600-1525120200@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Micheál Ó Conghaile - 30 April DESCRIPTION:The ILS is delighted to announce that the ILS / ITS Noel O’Connell Annual Memorial Lecture will be given by Micheál Ó Conghaile on his Irish language translations of the London-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh and the Irish language literary scene today. Ag aistriú Martin Mc Donagh ansin dfheadainn labhairt faoi scribhneoireacht agus foilsitheoireacht na Gaeilge inniu agus ceisteanna a fhreagairt. Ó Conghaile’s translations of McDonagh’s work – The Beauty Queen of Leenane (Banríon Álainn an Líonáin)\, The Cripple of Inishmaan (Cripil Inis Meáin)\, and The Lonesome West (Ualach an Uaignis) – have received acclaimed productions by the Galway International Arts Festival. \nPlease note that the venue for this event is the Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith. For the ILS April and May events while our usual home the Bloomsbury Hotel is being refurbished we will be at the ICC Hammersmith. \nÓ Conghaile was born and is based in Connemara\, Galway\, he is a member of Aosdána and established the publishing house\, Cló Iar-Chonnacht in 1985. This event is organised in conjunction with the Irish Texts Society. You can read his short story The Colours of a Man here. The talk will be delivered in English with readings in Irish and English by the actor Aonghus Weber. \nPresented in association with the Irish Texts Society:\n\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nMicheál Ó Conghaile\nMicheál Ó Conghaile was born in Inis Treabhair\, Galway\, in 1962. He established the publishing company Cló Iar-Chonnachta (CIC) in 1985 and has since published over 300 books and 200 traditional Irish music albums and spoken word albums to date. \nHis short stories are collected as Mac an tSagairt (Gallimh\, Cló Iar-Chonnachta\,1986); An Fear a Phléasc (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 1997)\, An Fear nach nDéanann Gáire (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2003); and The Colours of Man (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2012). His novels include Sna Fir (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 1999)\, which was shortlisted for The Irish Times Literature Awards 2001; and the novella Seachrán Jeaic Sheáin Johnny (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2002). His poetry is collected as Comhrá Cailí (1987). His plays include Cúigear Chonamara (Gallimh\, An Taibhdhearc\, 2003)\, translated by Una Ní Chonchuir as The Connemara Five (Galway\, Arlen House\, 2007); and Jude\, one of the winners of Gradam Cuimhneacháin Bháitéir Uí Mhaicín\, and published as Jude (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2007). He has translated Martin McDonagh’s plays The Beauty Queen of Leenane as Banríon Álainn an Líonáin; and The Lonesome West as Ualach an Uaignis (Cló Iar-Chonnachta\, 2002). He translated the Irish-language film Kings (directed by Tom Collins. 2007)\, based on the English-language play The Kings of the Kilburn High Road\, by Jimmy Murphy. His works have been translated into various languages\, including Romanian\, Croatian\, Albanian\, German and English. A member of Aosdána\, he lives in Indreabhán\, County Galway. \n\nAonghus Weber\nAonghus was born and has lived most of his life in Ireland. He moved to London after training at The Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. In Ireland Aonghus worked extensively in TV and film: a founding cast member of TG4’s long running soap opera Ros na Rún and a cast member of RTE’s television drama series Glenroe. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/micheal-o-conghaile-30-april/ LOCATION:Irish Cultural Centre\, Hammersmith\, 5 Black’s Road Hammersmith\, W6 9DT\, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:history,Irish language,lecture,Reading,theatre,tradition ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Micheál-Ó-Conghaile-4.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180219T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180219T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20171207T203821Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180208T101132Z UID:9857-1519068600-1519074000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Jews in Irish Literature - 19 Feb DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society is engaging with writers and academics to reflect on ‘Representations of Jews in Irish Literature’. The innovative research project of the same title was developed out of NUI Galway and Ulster University and forms the centre of tonight’s event. The main objective of the project is to analyse representations of Jews in Irish literature from the earliest times to the present. The project is investigating references to Jews in Irish literature\, whether in Irish or English\, and is collecting more substantial references into an anthology of such writing. In addition to a talk on the findings we will be welcoming a novelist\, poet and scriptwriter to read from and reflect on their work which explores Jewish-Irish connections. \nThe academic and creative work presented explores the processes of othering by investigating the forces in consciousness and culture which generate the assumptions\, biases\, stereotypes and myths out of which the Jewish other is produced. The representation of the Jew in Irish literature actually tells us much more about Irish than about Jewish identity\, how in fact a whole psychohistory of Irishness is hidden in these neglected representations. \nPresented in association with the Representations of the Jews in Irish Literature Project:\n\n\nSpeaker:\n\nDr Barry Montgomery \nBarry Montgomery is an Irish literary scholar specialising in Irish Jewish Studies and Irish Fiction. He has contributed seven chapters (from the Early Modern Period to the present in Irish fiction\, drama and poetry) to the forthcoming co-authored critical volume of the AHRC funded Ulster University and NUI Galway Representations of Jews in Irish Literature project. He forms part of the project team for the accompanying Exhibition\, which he has promoted on RTÉ radio\, Irish television\, and newspaper interviews\, delivering lectures on Irish Jewish Literary Studies at the Royal Irish Academy\, Dublin\, at The Linen Hall Library\, Belfast (to mark Holocaust Memorial Day\, 2017)\, and related conference papers at The University of Notre Dame\, Indiana\, and Georgetown University\, Washington DC. He has written on Ruth Gilligan’s Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan\, has contributed to the forthcoming Crime Fiction – A Critical Casebook (Peter Lang)\, writing on Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665)\, and contributed several entries on early nineteenth century fiction to The Cambridge Guide to the Eighteenth-Century Novel\, 1660-1820.\n \n\nRuth Gilligan\nRuth Gilligan is an Irish novelist and journalist now living in London and working as a Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. She has published four novels to date\, and was the youngest ever person to reach number one on the Irish bestsellers’ list. Her most recent novel\, Nine Folds Make a Paper Swan (2016)\, was based around the history of the Jewish community in Ireland\, and garnered major critical acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic. Her short stories have appeared in publications such as The Istanbul Review\, The Irish Pages\, Ambit and Banshee Lit. She writes regular literary reviews for the Guardian\, the TLS\, the LA Review of Books and the Irish Independent where she was a columnist for a number of years. She is also part of the global organisation Narrative 4 which uses storytelling as a tool to foster empathy between diverse communities. \n \n\nSimon Lewis\nSimon Lewis was the winner of the Hennessy Prize for Emerging Poetry and the runner up in the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 2015. He also featured in Poetry Ireland’s Introductions series the same year. He has been shortlisted for the Shine/Strong Award\, Listowel Poetry Prize\, Strokestown International Poetry Prize and Bridport Prize and received commendations in the Gregory O’Donoghue prize and Dromineer Literary Prize. He has also been published in many literary journals and magazines including The Stony Thursday\, Boyne Berries\, Literary Orphans\, The Stinging Fly\, Bare Hands\, and Irish Literary Review. His first collection\, Jewtown\, was published in 2016 by Doire Press. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/jews-in-irish-literature-19-feb/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,exile,folklore,history,interview,judaism,lecture,novel,poetry,politics,Reading,religion,research,social history ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/jews-irish-lit-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180129T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180129T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20170812T170028Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180826T111002Z UID:9364-1517254200-1517259600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Roddy Doyle - 29 Jan DESCRIPTION:One of Ireland’s best-loved writers makes his first appearance at the Irish Literary Society. Doyle joins us in conversation on his books\, films\, educational work and his forthcoming novel\, Smile. It tells the captivating story of Victor Forde\, for whom a chance meeting in a pub conjures up long-buried childhood memories – and it’s a book about how we all struggle to accommodate our past selves.\nThere is not a writer currently working in the English language who can match Doyle for the fluency with which he tacks back and forth between the hilarious and the heartbreaking.\nThe New York Times Book Review\nA chance meeting with an old school friend leads his protagonist on a journey back to being taught by Christian Brothers. Smile has all the features for which Doyle has become famous: the razor-sharp dialogue\, the humour\, the superb evocation of childhood – but this is a novel unlike any he has written before. Just moved in to a new apartment\, alone for the first time in years\, Victor Forde goes every evening to Donnelly’s pub for a pint\, a slow one. One evening his drink is interrupted. A man in shorts and pink shirt brings over his pint and sits down. He seems to know Victor’s name and to remember him from school. Says his name is Fitzpatrick. Victor dislikes him on sight\, dislikes too the memories that Fitzpatrick stirs up of five years being taught by the Christian Brothers. He prompts other memories too – of Rachel\, his beautiful wife who became a celebrity\, and of Victor’s own small claim to fame\, as the man who says the unsayable on the radio. But it’s the memories of school\, and of one particular Brother\, that he cannot control and which eventually threaten to destroy his sanity. Doyle will be in conversation with Gavin Clarke. \nSpeaker: Roddy Doyle\n\nRoddy Doyle was born in Dublin in 1958 and grew up in Kilbarrack. After graduating from University College Dublin he spent several years as an English and geography teacher before becoming a full-time writer. His novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha won the Booker Prize in 1993. Several of his novels\, including The Commitments and The Snapper have been successfully adapted into films. Doyle’s work is set primarily in Ireland\, especially working-class Dublin. Inspired by David Eggers’ 826 Valencia\, he co-founded the children’s writing charity Fighting Words. Doyle has also written many novels for children\, including the Rover Adventures series. He has also written many short stories\, several of which have been published in The New Yorker. In 2016\, he translated Mozart’s Don Giovanni for the Opera Theatre Company. The stage version of The Commitments\, adapted by Doyle\, opened in London’s Palace Theatre in 2013 and toured Britain and Ireland until May 2016. \nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/roddy-doyle-29-jan/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,history,interview,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/doyle-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171127T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171127T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20170812T121644Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T220522Z UID:9350-1511811000-1511816400@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Eimear McBride - 27 Nov DESCRIPTION:Eimear McBride joins the Irish Literary Society to discuss and read from her work. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as ‘a writer of remarkable power and originality\,’ McBride’s debut A Girl is a Half-formed Thing received the inaugural Goldsmiths Prize\, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year. Her short stories have appeared in Dubliners 100\, The Long Gaze Back and have been broadcast on BBC Radio 4. She writes and reviews for the The Guardian\, New Statesman and the TLS.\n“Blazingly daring…[McBride’s] prose is a visceral throb\, and the sentences run meanings together to produce a kind of compression in which words\, freed from the tedious march of sequence\, seem to want to merge with one another\, as paint and musical notes can. The results are thrilling\, and also thrillingly efficient. The language plunges us into the centre of experiences that are often raw\, unpleasant\, frightening\, but also vital.”James Wood\, The New Yorker\nHer most recent novel\, The Lesser Bohemians\, follows a young Irish woman who arrives in London from Ireland in the 1990s\, to study drama and falls passionately\, dangerously in love with an older actor. The older man has a disturbing past for which the young girl is unprepared and her troubled past becomes apparent. A bold and subversive story about sexual passion\, The Lesser Bohemians is also a celebration of love\, and how it can both destroy and create. McBride will be in conversation with Shevaun Wilder. \nSpeaker: Eimear McBride\n \nEimear McBride was born in 1976 in Liverpool to Northern Irish parents. Aged two she and her family returned to Ireland and her childhood was mostly spent in Tubbercurry\, Co. Sligo. At fourteen they moved again to Castlebar\, Co Mayo. In 1994\, at seventeen\, she went to London and spent the next three years studying acting at Drama Centre. Much of her twenties were spent temping and travelling. At twenty-seven she wrote A Girl is a Half-formed Thing. It won the 2013 Goldsmiths Prize\, was shortlisted for the 2014 Folio Prize and won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction 2014. She moved to Cork in 2006\, and Norwich in 2011\, where she currently lives with her husband and daughter. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/eimear-mcbride-27-nov/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:exile,interview,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/Eimear-McBride-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171114T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171114T200000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 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:20260525T135436 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:20170921T180000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170921T200000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20170812T103942Z LAST-MODIFIED:20180128T230003Z UID:9342-1506016800-1506024000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:William Trevor - 21 Sept DESCRIPTION:EMBASSY OF IRELAND event – The Embassy of Ireland has kindly reserved a number of tickets for Irish Literary Society members for its celebration of the life and work of William Trevor. Please contact the Hon. Secretary for further details. \nThe Ambassador of Ireland Mr. Adrian O’Neill\, the Trevor family and Viking Books host an evening to celebrate the life and work of William Trevor KBE at the Embassy of Ireland. The evening will feature the Chinese-American author Yiyun Li and the great cellist Steven Isserlis\, both friends and admirers of the late author. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/william-trevor-21-sept/ LOCATION:The Embassy of Ireland\, 17 Grosvenor Pl\, London \, London\, SW1X 7HR CATEGORIES:biography,interview,Reading,short story,special event ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/william-trevor-slider-1.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170626T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20170418T182200Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T225429Z UID:9088-1498505400-1498510800@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Eavan Boland - 26 June 2017 DESCRIPTION:Widely considered to be one of Ireland’s most important contemporary poets\, Eavan Boland is currently a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme at Stanford University\, where she has taught since 1996. In 2015 a New Collected Poems was published\, and Eavan Boland: Inside History\, a book celebrating her long and distinguished career\, was recently published by Arlen House\, its editor will join in conversation with Boland. In January 2017 Boland was appointed editor of Poetry Ireland Review.\nPoetry has been an integral part of Eavan Boland’s life since she was a young girl. In college she wrote her first publication\, 23 Poems. She has gone on to publish nearly 20 books of poetry\, winning awards and accolades from readers and critics alike. Boland\, a self-described “woman poet\,” has always had trouble reconciling those two words. “It was like there was a magnetic opposition between the two concepts\,” she said. “The woman coming from the collective sense of nurture in Ireland\, and the poet coming from the much more individualist\, creative realm.” Mary Robinson quoted Eavan Boland’s poetry during her inaugural speech as President of Ireland in Dublin Castle on 3 December 1990\, and on 15 March 2016 President Obama quoted lines from her poem “On a Thirtieth Anniversary” (from Against Love Poetry) in his remarks at a reception in the White House to celebrate St Patrick’s Day. \nBoland’s is a fascinating career which develops from her early attachment to Yeats\, her growing unease with the absence of women’s writing\, her encounter with pioneering American poets like Sylvia Plath\, Elizabeth Bishop\, and Adrienne Rich\, and her lucid\, critical engagement through poetry and prose with Ireland’s poetic tradition. \nThis event was formerly advertised as the ILS Annual Dinner\, the dinner part of the evening has now been cancelled. \nGuest of Honour: Eavan Boland\n \nBoland\, the youngest of five children\, was born in Dublin in 1944. Her father was a diplomat\, her mother\, Frances Kelly\, an artist. The family moved to London when Boland was six and she went to school there until 1956. Her poem An Irish Childhood in England: 1951 recalls her sense of otherness at this early age: \n…the teacher in the London convent who\,\nwhen I produced “I amn’t” in the classroom\nturned and said — “You’re not in Ireland now.” \nDuring her father’s next posting\, from 1956 until 1960\, the family lived in New York. Boland returned to Dublin and to boarding school at the Convent of the Holy Child in Killiney when she was fifteen. At Trinity College she studied Latin and English and graduated with a first-class honours degree in 1966. She lectured in Trinity 1967-1968 and then resigned to devote her time to writing. She wrote poems as a child and had published poems in the Irish Times while still an undergraduate. She published her first collection\, New Territory\, in 1967\, when she was twenty-two. During the 1970s she gave writing workshops throughout Ireland and in 1980 she co-founded Arlen House\, an Irish feminist press. \nFor Boland\, what she calls ‘the placelessness of her childhood’ and ‘her emphatic sense of living in a suburb in her own home’ were important influences on her work. In 1969\, in her mid-twenties\, she married the novelist Kevin Casey. They moved to a house in the Dublin suburbs in the early 1970s and have two daughters. A grandchild was born in 2014. She has written of motherhood and suburban life and according to Declan Kiberd ‘She is one of the very few Irish poets to describe with any fidelity the lives now lived by half a million people in the suburbs of Dublin.’ \nSince 1996\, Boland spends the academic year at Stanford College\, Palo Alto\, California\, where she is a Professor of Humanities and Director of the Creative Writing Programme\, but she calls Dundrum home. Speaking in 1988\, Boland said of herself: ‘I see myself as an Irish poet\, I think it’s important that Irish poets have a discourse with the idea of Irishness\, and I think it’s probably very important that an Irish woman poet doesn’t shirk that discourse because there have been gaps\, vacancies or silences in literature’. URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/annual-dinner-eavan-boland-26-june-2017/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:America,art,biography,book signing,exile,history,interview,poetry,politics,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/eavan-boland3-slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170522T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170522T203000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20170228T211301Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230150Z UID:9033-1495481400-1495485000@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Donal Ryan - 22 May DESCRIPTION:The novelist Donal Ryan joins Dorothy Allen to discuss his latest novel\, All We Shall Know. Ryan’s award-winning debut\, The Spinning Heart\, was published to great acclaim in 2012: it won the Guardian First Book Award\, the European Union Prize for Literature\, and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. The Thing About December and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun followed soon after. All We Shall Know is a tragic and vivid tale which confirms Ryan as an acute chronicler of the disaffection at the heart of present-day Ireland. \nAll We Shall Know tells the story of Melody Shee. At 33 years-old\, she finds herself pregnant with the child of a 17 year-old Traveller boy\, Martin Toppy\, and not by her husband Pat. Melody was teaching Martin to read\, but now he’s gone\, and Pat leaves too\, full of rage. She’s trying to stay in the moment\, but the future is looming\, while the past won’t let her go. It’s a good thing that she meets Mary Crothery when she does. Mary is a bold young Traveller woman\, and she knows more about Melody than she lets on. She might just save Melody’s life. \nFollowing the nine months of her pregnancy\, All We Shall Know unfolds with emotional immediacy in Melody’s fierce\, funny\, and unforgettable voice\, as she contends with her choices\, past and present. Without disclosing the details of this final scene\, it does not seem extravagant to claim it is worthy of Greek drama. That the tragedies of our own age happen in suburban semis\, or on Travellers’ sites\, does not make them any less cathartic – and Ryan’s choice of narrator\, a character both deeply flawed and painfully guilty\, shows him working in the great tradition of tragic fiction\, his lonely adulteress coming to grief in the same shadowy spaces as Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina.The Guardian \n‘Martin Toppy is the son of a famous Traveller and the father of my unborn child. He’s seventeen\, I’m thirty-three. I was his teacher. I’d have killed myself by now if I was brave enough. I don’t think it would hurt the baby. His little heart would stop with mine. He wouldn’t feel himself leaving one world of darkness for another\, his spirit untangling itself from me.’ \nSpeaker:\n\nDonal Ryan is from Nenagh in County Tipperary. His first two novels\, The Spinning Heart and The Thing About December\, and his short story collection A Slanting of the Sun\, have all been published to major acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award\, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland)\, and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award; and longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize. The Thing About December was shortlisted for the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year and Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards\, and the title story of A Slanting of the Sun won the writing.ie Short Story of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Donal holds a Writing Fellowship at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children just outside Limerick City.\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/donal-ryan-22-may/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,novel,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/ryan2_slider.jpg END:VEVENT BEGIN:VEVENT DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170424T193000 DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170424T210000 DTSTAMP:20260525T135436 CREATED:20170109T164338Z LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230245Z UID:8864-1493062200-1493067600@irishliterarysociety.org SUMMARY:Carlo Gébler - 24 April DESCRIPTION:Author\, playwright\, teacher and filmmaker Dr. Carlo Gébler visits the ILS to read from his work and reflect on his career\, changes in attitudes to literature in his lifetime and his recent short story collection and memoirs. His most recent publications are The Projectionist\, the story of Ernest Gébler\, a life of his father that mixes memoir and biography\, the short story collection\, The Wing Orderly’s Tales\, and Confessions of a Catastrophist (2015). \nFor almost 25 years\, Gebler worked as a teacher and writer-in-residence in the Maze and Maghaberry Prisons. In his 2016 book of short stories based on that experience\, The Wing Orderly’s Tales\, he gives a fascinating insight into the inmates he worked with and why some people end up committing crimes. Previous work considering imprisonment and its consequences includes A Good Day For A Dog (2008) and My father’s Watch (2009) – the latter written with Patrick Maguire is an intensely moving memoir of his co-author\, one of the ‘Maguire Seven’\, wrongly imprisoned as a teenager for making bombs for the IRA. Gébler has already proved himself a master at transmuting historical facts into compelling fiction…And in this new novel he’s just as adroit at creating psychological and dramatic suspense out of known facts … a book so rich in characterisation\, so expertly paced and so well written that it works equally well as absorbing social history and page-turning thriller.Irish Independent \nAs a catastrophist who never doubted from the moment he started that conditions in what he calls the Kingdom of Letters would only get worse\, Carlo Gébler is not in the least surprised by how things have turned out. It was always going to go downhill and in his Confessions of a Catastrophist (2015) he described that process but in his own personal\, idiosyncratic and caustic way. The book is an intriguing mixture of pungent\, fierce and striking memoir with pithy mordant notes on the literary trade\, on the books he’s written and why he wrote them\, and on the difficult business of negotiating a way through the thickets and trying to make a living. Also published in 2015 was his part biography/part memoir about his relationship with his father Ernest Gébler: The Projectionist: The Story of Ernest Gébler. He tells the enthralling story of his father’s life\, covering his strange and alienated childhood\, his disastrous family relationships\, his marriage to writer Edna O’Brien\, his staunch socialism and uncompromising disciplinary attitude\, and his final heartbreaking struggle with Alzheimer’s disease. \nSpeaker:\n\nCarlo Gébler was born Dublin in 1954\, the eldest son of writer parents\, Ernest Gébler and Edna O’Brien. He was educated at Bedales School\, the University of York\, where he studied English\, and the National Film & Television School. He has a PhD from Queen’s University\, Belfast. He started his career in television and made a number of documentary films for Channel 4 and others. Gébler is also the author of novels\, short stories and radio dramas. As well as his film-making and literary work\, Gébler has also worked as a teacher and academic. In the early nineties he was the creative writing tutor at the Maze prison and since 1997 he has been the writer-in-residence in HMP Maghaberry. Gébler has taught at Queen’s University Belfast and has contributed to the creative writing programme at the Oscar Wilde Centre\, Trinity College Dublin\, for many years and currently teaches the ‘Writing for a Living’ course there. He was elected a member of the Aosdána in 1990. He is a past chairman of the Irish Writers’ Centre. He is married with five children and currently resides outside Enniskillen\, Co Fermanagh\, Northern Ireland.\nSpread the word: URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/carlo-gebler-24-april/ LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom CATEGORIES:biography,book signing,interview,novel,Reading ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Carlo.jpg END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR