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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20191028T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20191028T210000
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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
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190930T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190930T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190605T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190605T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20190319T153508Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190604T084909Z
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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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190429T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190429T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190418T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190418T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190325T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190325T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20190225T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20190225T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20181029T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20181029T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180924T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180924T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180521T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180521T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180430T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180430T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180219T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180219T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20180129T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20180129T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171114T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171114T200000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20171030T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20171030T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170921T180000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170921T200000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170626T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170626T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170522T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170522T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170424T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170424T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
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
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20170130T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20170130T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20161208T132154Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T230959Z
UID:8719-1485804600-1485808200@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Sebastian Barry - 30 Jan
DESCRIPTION:The great Irish writer Sebastian Barry visits the ILS on 30 January to join in conversation with Prof Roy Foster about his new novel Days Without End. \nThe novel continues Barry’s saga of two Irish families\, the Dunnes and the McNultys\, which has spanned several novels and multiple time frames and locations. The Guardian has called the sequence ‘one of the most compelling\, bravura and heart-wrenching fictional projects of recent memory.’A beautiful\, savage\, tender\, searing work of art. Sentence after perfect sentence it grips and does not let go.Donal Ryan \n‘Time was not something then we thought of as an item that possessed an ending\,\nbut something that would go on for ever\, all rested and stopped in that moment.\nHard to say what I mean by that. You look back at all the endless years when you\nnever had that thought. I am doing that now as I write these words in Tennessee. I\nam thinking of the days without end of my life. And it is not like that now…’ \nAfter signing up for the US army in the 1850s\, aged barely seventeen\, Thomas\nMcNulty and his brother-in-arms\, John Cole\, go on to fight in the Indian wars and\,\nultimately\, the Civil War. Having fled terrible hardships themselves\, they find these days to be vivid and filled with wonder\, despite the horrors they both witness and are complicit in. Their lives are further enriched and endangered when a young Indian girl crosses their path\, and the possibility of lasting happiness emerges\, if only they can survive.A violent\, superbly lyrical western offering a sweeping vision of America in the making [and] the most fascinating line-by-line first person narration I’ve come across in years.Kazuo Ishiguro \nMoving from the plains of the West to Tennessee\, Sebastian Barry’s latest work is a masterpiece of atmosphere and language. Both an intensely poignant story of two men and the lives they are dealt\, and a fresh look at some of the most fateful years in America’s past\, Days Without End is a novel never to be forgotten. \nSpeakers:\n\nSebastian Barry\nSebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955. His novels and plays have won the Costa Book of the Year award\, the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Prize\, the Irish Book Awards Novel of the Year\, the Independent Booksellers Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. He also had two consecutive novels\, A Long Long Way (2005) and the top ten bestseller The Secret Scripture (2008)\, shortlisted for the MAN Booker Prize. He lives in Wicklow.\n\n\nProf Roy Foster\nRoy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/sebastian-barry-30-jan/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:America,book signing,history,interview,novel,Reading
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20161128T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20161128T213000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20160921T144943Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T231416Z
UID:8188-1480361400-1480368600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:London Irish poetic tradition - 28 Nov
DESCRIPTION:  \nThe ILS teams up with RTÉ’s Poetry Programme to reflect on the London-Irish poetic tradition. Presenter Rick O’Shea talks to the ILS President Bernard O’Donoghue\, and Vice President Roy Foster about the work and reception of Irish poets in London and how the city shaped those writers and fed back into Irish culture. A recording of this event is now available on the RTÉ Poetry Programme website.  \n Our overview takes the Revival as starting point and considers the work of Irish poets who have passed through or settled in London such as Yeats\, Tynan\, Clarke\, MacNeice\, Boland and Heaney. Our panel of poets will reflect on the anxiety of influence\, the notion of tradition and the tensions and opportunities for the Irish poet in London. \nSpeakers:\n\nSiobhán Campbell\nSiobhán is a poet\, critic and lecturer. She is the author of five works of poetry and co-editor of the forthcoming book of essays on the work of Eavan Boland. Her poetry has received awards in the National Poetry Competition and the Troubadour International Competition and is the recipient of an Arts Council award and the Templar Poetry Prize. Much of Campbell’s work is expressive of her interest in the place of the political poem in contemporary poetics – her forthcoming volume Heat Signature (March\, 2017) reflects on commemoration and the centenary of the Dublin Rising while her Cross Talk (2010) explored boundaries and the interwoven nature of family\, local and historical conflicts.\n\nCahal Dallat\nSince moving to London 40 years ago the Ballycastle native has been a computer scientist and a critic\, a musician and a broadcaster. Dallat’s literary horizons broadened when he joined a nascent poetry workshop run by Robert Greacon\, an esteemed Dublin writer who had relocated to London. His poetry appears in a range of literary magazines & anthologies\, in Trio 7 (with John Kelly & Sean McWilliams\, Blackstaff Press\, 1992)\, Morning Star (Lagan Press\, 1998) and in The Year of Not Dancing (Blackstaff Press\, 2009).\n\nMartina Evans\nMartina Evans is a poet\, novelist and teacher. She grew up in County Cork in a country pub\, shop and petrol station and is the youngest of ten children. She is the author of ten books of prose and poetry. She is currently Associate Lecturer in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University\, London and a Lector for the Royal Literary Reading Round 2014-2016. Watch\, a pamphlet was published by Rack Press in January 2016 and The Windows of Graceland\, New & Selected Poems was published by Carcanet in May 2016. Martina will feature in the broadcast but will not be present at the event.\n\nProf Roy Foster\nRoy Foster recently retired as Carroll Professor of Irish history at Oxford\, he is a fellow of Hertford College. He has written widely on Irish history\, society and politics in the modern period\, as well as on Victorian high politics and culture. Foster produced a widely acclaimed biography of William Butler Yeats which was awarded the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. In Words Alone: Yeats and his inheritances (2011)\, he presents a re-reading of Irish literary history throughout the nineteenth century and places Yeats and his inspirations in apposition to a much wider range of literary and political precursors than is usually the case. His most recent book is Vivid Faces: the revolutionary generation in Ireland 1890-1914.\n\nProf Bernard O’Donoghue\nBernard O’Donoghue is a Professor and Emeritus Fellow in English at Wadham College\, Oxford. He is a poet and literary critic\, and author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995) – he succeeded Heaney as President of the ILS. His most recent poetry collection is The Seasons of Cullen Church (2016)\, which has been shortlisted for the T S Elliot award. Previous volumes include Farmer’s Cross (2011)\, Gunpowder (1995)\, Here Nor There (1999); Outliving (2003)\, Selected Poems in 2008. O’Donoghue was winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award and Cholmondeley Award in 2009.\n\nDeclan Ryan\nDeclan Ryan was born in County Mayo\, Ireland and has lived in London since. His pamphlet was published in the Faber New Poets series. He is poetry editor at Ambit and teaches at King’s College London. Declan Ryan’s poem\, ‘From Alun Lewis’ was featured in the Autumn 2012 issue of The Poetry Review. His poems and reviews have also been published in Poetry London\, The Rialto\, and elsewhere. He was also named one of the Faber New Poets in 2014. \nReaders: Donal Cox\, Peter Power-Hynes\, Patricia Leventon\, Michael McClain\, Shevaun Wilder. \nShare this Post
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/london-irish-poetic-tradition/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,special event
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20161031T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20161031T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20160917T181822Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T233613Z
UID:8138-1477942200-1477947600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Rattlebag\, Looking West - 31 Oct
DESCRIPTION:Our eclectic Rattlebag forum returns with the novelist Jess Kidd\, poet Kimberly Campanello and academic Clare Walker Gore. Kidd’s brilliantly original debut novel Himself is a gothic detective story set in 1970s Mayo with a cast of ghosts. Having been abandoned on the steps of an orphanage as an infant\, lovable car thief and Dublin charmer Mahony assumed all his life that his mother had simply given him up. But when he receives an anonymous note suggesting that foul play may have led to his mother’s disappearance\, he sees only one option: to return to the rural Irish village where he was born and find out what really happened twenty-six years ago. … “I love this book. It’s a magic realist murder mystery set in rural Ireland\, in which the dead play as important a part as the living. It’s one of those books that has you smiling as you read\, and that you plan to read again very soon.”. Louis de Bernières\, bestselling author of Corelli’s Mandolin on Himself \nDr Campanello is an Irish-American poet who has produced fine work in Strange Country (Dreadful Press\, 2015) which inhabits the complexity of the sheela-na-gigs – ancient stone carvings of female figures that prominently display the vulva\, which are found on churches\, castles and town walls across Ireland and some of Britain. Campanello will read from Strange Country and present her sonically rich project about the St Mary’s Mother and Baby Home in Tuam\, MOTHERBABYHOME (zimZalla Avant Objects\, forthcoming in 2016). \nDr Clare Walker Gore of the University of Cambridge discusses The Life of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh and what this fascinating biography contributes to our understanding of disabled people in the 19th century. Born at Borris House in County Carlow without hands and feet\, he was an adventurous traveller and a Member of Parliament\, a tiger-hunting landowner whose attempts to resist the rising tide of Irish nationalism were ultimately defeated\, and whose amazing career has been largely forgotten. But how did his first biographer meet the challenge of writing his life? \nOur three panelists will be in conversation with Gavin Clarke. \nSpeakers:\n\nDr Jess Kidd\nJess Kidd has a PhD in Creative Writing from St. Mary’s University in Strawberry Hill and currently teaches Creative Writing to adult learners and undergraduates. Before that she was a support worker specialising in acquired brain injury. She grew up as a part of a large family from Mayo and now lives in London with her daughter. Himself is Jess’ first novel and she is now completing her second\, a contemporary crime novel called Hoarder and a collection of short stories.\n\n\nDr Kimberly Campanello\nKimberly Campanello was born in Elkhart\, Indiana\, and is a dual American and Irish citizen. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing at York St John University. Her poetry publications include Spinning Cities (Wurm Press\, 2011)\, Consent (Doire Press\, 2013)\, and Imagines (New Dublin Press\, 2015). In October 2015\, The Dreadful Press published Strange Country\, Campanello’s full-length collection on the sheela-na-gig stone carvings. ZimZalla will publish MOTHERBABYHOME\, a book of conceptual and visual poetry in 2016. \nDr Clare Walker Gore\nEarly career researcher working on disability in Victorian literature especially novels by Charles Dickens\, Wilkie Collins\, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot\, and the biographies of the period. Particular interests in disability history and women’s writing. PhD from Selwyn College\, Cambridge\, Junior Research Fellow at Trinity College\, Cambridge from October 2016. \nShare this Post
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/rattlebag-looking-west-31-oct/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,research
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Rattlebag-2016-1.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160926T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160926T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20160917T111218Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20180329T121545Z
UID:8111-1474918200-1474923600@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Alice Milligan\, 150 - 26 Sept
DESCRIPTION:It is fitting that first event of the ILS 2016-17 125th anniversary season marks the anniversary of one of its earliest members and a central figure in the Irish Cultural Revival. Dr Catherine Morris will reflect on her life and legacy of Alice Milligan on the 150th anniversary of her birth in her talk ‘Transformative Art and the Irish Cultural Revival.’ \nMorris’ book is the first study to explore the life and work of Alice Milligan (1866–­1953). A prolific writer for over six decades\, she published her work in a range of genres (including poetry\, short stories\, novels\, travelogues\, biography\, plays\, journalism\, letters\, and memoirs). From 1891 to the 1940s\, she founded a series of cultural\, feminist\, commemorative and political organizations that put the north on the map of the Irish Cultural Revival and provided a new resonance to Irish visual culture. The biography not only reclaims an unjustly forgotten Irish cultural and political activist during this foundational era in modern Ireland\, but also provides new ways of interpreting the Irish Cultural Revival itself. \n… A profound and moving analysis of one of the greatest inventors of modern Ireland\, this account of Alice Milligan itself displays those qualities of intellectual versatility and imaginative audacity which ennobled her life through its many astonishing phases.Professor Declan Kiberd \nA graphic novel exploring the life of Alice Milligan and her role in the revival of Irish culture during the early 20th century is available to download and view. Developed by Dr Morris and Nerve Centre’s Creative Centenaries project\, in conjunction with Revolve Comics\, the short story charts some of the experiences of Alice Milligan and her work in the preservation of Irish cultures and beliefs: Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival \nSpeaker:\n \nDr Catherine Morris\nCatherine Morris is Liverpool Central Library’s first Writer-in-Residence. Her project\, Intimate Power: Autobiography of a City\, montaging life-writing with photo-essays and community interviews is being made on location at resonant sites across Liverpool. Her monograph\, Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival\, uncovered the forgotten arts practice of one of the founders of modern Ireland. In 2016\, she worked with Nerve Centre in Derry to launch a graphic novel of Milligan’s life as part of the Key Stage 3 National Curriculum for schools in Northern Ireland. Her exhibition Alice Milligan and the Irish Cultural Revival at the National Library of Ireland was opened by Fiona Shaw (2010). In 2012\, she gifted her research archive to Omagh Public Library. She was curatorial advisor on the Irish Museum of Modern Art exhibition El Lissitzky: the Artists and the State; is co-founder of the Artist Centre for Human Rights\, co-editor of The Cassandra Echo & an Honorary Fellow of the Centre for Irish Studies at the University of Liverpool.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/alice-milligan-150-26-sept/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,Reading,research
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/milligan1-1.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160425T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160425T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20160221T003539Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T232440Z
UID:7662-1461612600-1461616200@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Bernard MacLaverty - 25 April
DESCRIPTION:The annual ILS / St Mary’s University\, Centre for Irish Studies lecture will this year feature the great Irish writer Bernard MacLaverty in conversation with Dr Richard Mills. \nMacLaverty is the author of the novels Lamb (1980); Cal (1983); Grace Notes (1997); and The Anatomy School (2001)\, set in Belfast in the late 1960s. Both Lamb and Cal have been made into major films for which he wrote the screenplays\, and he has written various versions of his fiction for radio\, television and screen. Grace Notes was awarded the 1997 Saltire Society Scottish Book of the Year Award and shortlisted for many other major prizes\, including the Booker Prize for Fiction and the Whitbread Novel Award. \nHis books of short stories are Secrets & Other Stories (1977); A Time to Dance & Other Stories (1982); The Great Profundo & Other Stories (1987); Walking the Dog & Other Stories (1994)\, Matters of Life & Death (2006) and most recently published his Collected Stories (2013). He has also written 2 books for young children: A Man in Search of a Pet (1978)\, which he also illustrated; and Andrew McAndrew (1988). \nIn 2003\, he wrote and directed a short film\, Bye-Child\, after a poem by Seamus Heaney\, which was nominated for a BAFTA (Best Short Film Award) and won a BAFTA Scotland (Best First Director Award).\nMacLaverty’s work is in a line from Chekhov\, via Frank O’Connor. He relates the kind of incidents you might hear from someone at a bus-stop or in bed: a house is burgled\, a woman is raped\, a neighbour’s bad parking is not what it seems. Whatever happens is both real and enriched by the telling of it\, and MacLaverty makes this look like a natural and obvious thing to do. It is not\, of course. Fans will recognise him in the details – the finer cuts of colloquial speech\, his microscopic eye and an ear for noises off. All of this anchored in personality; the distinctiveness of people being one of his great delights. Anne Enright \nPresented in association with the Centre for Irish Studies\, St Mary’s University\, Twickenham:\n\n\nSpeakers:\n \nBernard MacLaverty\nBernard MacLaverty was born in Belfast in 1942\, and moved to Scotland in 1975\, where he lived in Edinburgh\, on the Isle of Islay\, and now in Glasgow. He has been a Medical Laboratory Technician\, a mature student\, a teacher of English and occasionally a Writer-in-Residence (Universities of Aberdeen\, Augsburg\, Liverpool John Moore’s and Iowa State). After living for a time in Edinburgh and the Isle of Islay he now lives in Glasgow. He is a member of Aosdana in Ireland. \n\nDr Richard Mills\nRichard’s research interests are in Irish Literature and Popular Culture. Since 2002\, he has been a lecturer in Irish Studies\, Film\, Popular Culture\, English and Creative Writing at St Mary’s University. Mills’ recent publications include “‘That Orange and Green Dilemma’: Violence and the Traumatised Subject in Bernard MacLaverty’s Screenplays of Cal (1983) and Lamb (1985).” Bernard MacLaverty: New Critical Readings Richard Russell Rankin (ed.)\, (Bloomsbury: 2014). Forthcoming is ‘The Beatles Through Fans’ Eyes’\, Understanding the Beatles Volume 2: Creativity\, Reception\, Interpretation\, Marcus Collins and James McGrath (eds)\, (Equinox: 2016).
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/bernard-maclaverty-25-april/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,Reading,short story
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/maclaverty-slider-1.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160321T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160321T213000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20160301T130727Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234019Z
UID:7682-1458588600-1458595800@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:The Stinging Fly - 21 March
DESCRIPTION:The ILS comes together with The Stinging Fly literary magazine to reflect on the literary legacy of 1916. The bumper anniversary edition\, subtitled ‘In the Wake of the Rising’\, brings together 43 writers to respond to the literature and events of the 1916 Rising. Readings by contributors: Martina Evans\, Aisling Fahy\, Grahame Williams\, and Joan Win Brennan will accompany a discussion between the ILS Hon. Secretary\, Gavin Clarke\, with publisher Declan Meade and guest editor Sean O’Reilly.  \n… [I]n today’s tough market\, where literary fiction is no longer the cornerstone of the publishing business\, no longer the prestige flagship of any respectable publishing firm\, the influence of the literary magazine is arguably no longer what it once was. However\, in Ireland\, one small but beautifully formed magazine is bucking that trend\, launching the careers of literary talents\, nurturing them with care and even publishing their work in book form. How\, exactly\, does The Stinging Fly do it?”Alison Walsh\, The Sunday Independent\nSean O’Reilly on editing the special edition:\n\n‘There are many reasons behind the publication of this special edition of The Stinging Fly in the centenary year of the Easter Rising. Perhaps the most important one\, I would say\, is that any literary magazine\, whether it likes it or not\, is a product of the times in which it is made. Hopefully\, it is also an inspirational and critical response to those times. The issue would open up an alternative space for writers to re-read and respond to the events of that Easter Monday\, the background and the legacy\, and to the Proclamation itself\, a founding document of the Republic\, outside of the official events and memorials planned by the government of the day—which\, as I write\, is preparing to go to the people again. The writers were free to respond to this material in whatever way they wanted\, in any shape or form.’\n\nThe ‘In the Wake of the Rising’ issue will feature on The Book on One on RTÉ Radio One during the week March 21st to March 25th.\n\nContributors:\n The Stinging Fly magazine was established in 1997 to seek out\, publish and promote the very best new Irish and international writing. Three issues are published each year. The Stinging Fly Press operates in tandem with the magazine and has published debut short-story collections by Kevin Barry\, Michael J. Farrell\, Mary Costello\, Colin Barrett\, Claire-Louise Bennett and Danielle McLaughlin.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-stinging-fly-in-the-wake-of-the-rising/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:book signing,interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,short story
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/stinging-fly-slider-2.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160229T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160229T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20160207T173245Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T233047Z
UID:7631-1456774200-1456777800@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:The Long Gaze Back - 29 February
DESCRIPTION:Sinéad Gleeson and Lucy Caldwell discuss the new anthology of Irish women’s short stories\, The Long Gaze Back. The title comes from a line in The Visitor by Maeve Brennan\, whose story The Eldest Child in included in the collection. \n‘Gleeson directs her gaze back like a literary archaeologist who has excavated the archives and unearthed treasures for the short story lover’s delight.’ Ann O’NeillThe Long Gaze Back is an exhilarating anthology of thirty short stories by some of the most gifted women writers Ireland has ever produced. Taken together\, the collected works of these writers reveal an enrapturing\, unnerving\, and piercingly beautiful mosaic of a lively literary landscape. Spanning four centuries\, The Long Gaze Back features eight rare stories from deceased luminaries and forerunners\, and 22 new unpublished stories by some of the most talented Irish women writers working today. The anthology presents an inclusive and celebratory portrait of the high calibre of contemporary literature in Ireland. \nThese stories run the gamut from heartbreaking to humorous\, but each leaves a lasting impression. They chart the passions\, obligations\, trials and tribulations of a variety of vividly-drawn characters with unflinching honesty and relentless compassion.\n  \nSpeakers:\n\nSinéad Gleeson\nSinéad Gleeson is a broadcaster\, critic and writer who presents The Book Show on RTE Radio 1. She reviews books for The Irish Times and RTE Radio One’s arts show\, Arena. As a moderator at literary festivals\, Sinéad has interviewed many writers and artists\, including Martin Amis\, Edna O’Brien\, Ian McEwan\, Donna Tartt and Brian Eno. She is the editor of two short story anthologies\, Silver Threads of Hope\, and most recently The Long Gaze Back: an Anthology of Irish Women Writers\, which won Best Irish Published Book at the 2015 Irish Book Awards. She is currently editing another anthology for New Island Books\, which will be published in Autumn 2016. \n\nLucy Caldwell\nBorn in Belfast in 1981\, Lucy Caldwell read English at Queens’ College\, Cambridge and is a graduate of Goldsmith’s MA in Creative & Life Writing. She is the author the novels Where They Were Missed (2006) and The Meeting Point (2011)\, which featured on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime and was awarded the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her stage plays\, Leaves\, Guardians\, and Notes to Future Self\, and radio dramas\, Girl From Mars\, Avenues of Eternal Peace\, Witch Week\, have won awards including the George Devine Award and the Imison Award. In 2011 she was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature for her body of work to date. Her debut collection of short stories\, Multitudes\, will be published by Faber in May 2016.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/the-long-gaze-back/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,Reading,short story
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/long-gaze-image3.jpg
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BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20160125T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20160125T213000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20151212T130303Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20190103T021235Z
UID:7340-1453750200-1453757400@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Ireland 1916: Death of a Literary Revival? - 26 Jan
DESCRIPTION:The Irish Literary Society in association with the Irish Studies Centre\, London Metropolitan University\, present a reflection on the Irish Literary Revival (1891-1922).\n\nIrish artists representing various literary forms will join academics in discussion on the artistic legacy of the Revival. The playwright Marina Carr\, poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill and novelist Jennifer Johnston will discuss the influence of the Revival on their work and the place of the artist in Ireland after independence. Prof Declan Kiberd\, Dr PJ Mathews of University College Dublin (joint editors of the recent Handbook of the Irish Revival) will present a literary and historical overview of the period. Dr Tony Murray\, Director of the Irish Studies Centre\, will chair the evening. Members must  reserve tickets via the ILS Honorary Secretary (irishlitsoc@gmail.com)\, non-members can purchase tickets via the link below.\n[envira-gallery id=”7761″]\n\n\nfilming at the ILS Revival event with a capacity audience.\n\nSpeakers:\n\nMarina Carr\nOne of Ireland’s most celebrated playwrights whose poetic tragedies often reinterpret ancient myth and address violence and the place of women in Irish life. Across her great Midlands-set plays Carr creates a timeless version of Ireland\, replete with ghosts\, ill-fated women and tragic families. Throughout her work Carr’s engagement with myth and folktale can be read as a richly imaginative reflection on the development of Irish cultural identity.\n\n\nNuala Ní Dhomhnaill\nNí Dhomhnaill is one of the most prominent poets writing in the Irish language today. Her work has reflected profoundly on the tradition shaped by the Revival. From Gaelic myths she has recovered models of powerful Irish women\, including goddesses and queens. Of her work Bernard O’Donoghue\, ILS President\, has written “Her mixture of myth\, linguistic adeptness and feminine address are held together by an outstanding metaphorical force.”\n\nJennifer Johnston\nOne of Ireland’s great writers\, a Whitbread and Booker prize winner\, Johnston has produced brilliant work on the period of 1916-22 in Ireland and on the Great War\, often as a means of examining contemporary Irish life. The Old Jest (1979) and Fool’s Sanctuary (1987) are key works which describe how the War of Independence shattered families and opened class\, gender and religious divides.\n\n\nProfessor Declan Kiberd\nA leading international authority on the literature of Ireland\, both in English and Irish\, Kiberd has authored scores of articles and many books\, including Synge and the Irish Language; Men and Feminism in Irish Literature; Inventing Ireland; and most recently (with P.J. Mathews) Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Political and Cultural Writings 1891-1922 (Abbey Theatre Press\, 2015). He is a regular essayist and reviewer in the Irish Times\, TLS\, London Review of Books and the New York Times.\n\n\nDr PJ Matthews\nSenior Lecturer in the Department of English at University College Dublin\, Matthews’ research interests include: the literature and culture of the Irish Revival\, especially the work of J.M. Synge; twentieth century Irish writing; contemporary Irish theatre\, and Irish music. Publications include The Cambridge Companion to J. M. Synge; Revival: The Abbey Theatre; Sinn Féin\, the Gaelic League and the Co-operative Movement; and most recently (with Declan Kiberd) Handbook of the Irish Revival: An Anthology of Political and Cultural Writings 1891-1922 (Abbey Theatre Press\, 2015). He is also co-convenor of the Irish Studies Doctoral Research Network.\n\n\nDr Tony Murray\nDirector of the Irish Studies Centre at London Metropolitan University\, Murray’s research is in literary and cultural representations of the Irish diaspora with a particular focus on the Irish in Britain. He is responsible for the Archive of the Irish in Britain and especially interested in the role of narrative in the construction and mediation of migrant identities. Publications include London Irish Fictions: Narrative Diaspora and Identity (2012) and Winifred M. Patton and the Irish Revival in London (2014).\nThis event is presented in association with:\nLondon Metropolitan University\, home of the Irish Studies Centre \n\nThe ILS is supported by:
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/ireland-1916-death-of-a-literary-revival/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,poetry,Reading
ATTACH;FMTTYPE=image/jpeg:https://irishliterarysociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/jan-2106_3-3.jpg
END:VEVENT
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20151130T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20151130T203000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20151105T114338Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T233444Z
UID:7244-1448911800-1448915400@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Kevin Barry - 30 November
DESCRIPTION:Barry’s second novel is set in 1978 and imagines John Lennon on the west coast of Ireland\, his plan is to go to the island he owns\, Dorinish— which Lennon really did buy\, in 1967 — and to spend days of cathartic solitude there\, to confront the trauma of “love\, blood\, fate\, death\, sex\, the void” and scream until he finds release. The tale of a wild journey into the world and a wild journey within\, Beatlebone is a mystery box of a novel. It’s a portrait of an artist at a time of creative strife. It is most of all a sad and beautiful comedy from one of the most gifted stylists now at work. Barry will be reading and in conversation with Gavin Clarke. \nBarry on his writing process: Paris Review\, November 2013:I myself live in County Sligo in what seem like the perfect conditions for a writer—a room looking out on a swampy lake\, all very atmospheric\, ethereal mists\, yadda yadda\, and there’s nothing to fucking do but write. But after about two weeks of this\, I need to get out or I’ll go nuts. So I go and cycle around the west of Ireland. I mean I don’t do crazy\, German-type distances\, but I’ll go maybe forty or fifty kilometers a day. And as you go through all the different towns\, you pick up such different senses and reverbs from each place. It isn’t to do with how a place looks—there are run-down\, shitty towns that give you a happy\, spring-in-the-step feeling—but each place gives off its own very distinct feeling and sometimes it’s light and sometimes it’s really fucking dark.\n\nSpeaker:\n\nKevin Barry\nKevin Barry is the author of one novel and two short story collections\, the most recent of which\, Dark Lies the Island\, included the story ‘Beer Trip to Llandudno’ for which he won the Sunday Times EFG Private Bank Short Story Award 2012\, the world’s premier short story prize. His first collection of stories\, There Are Little Kingdoms was published by The Stinging Fly Press in 2007 and was an immediate success. His first novel\, City of Bohane(2011) received largely positive reviews and won the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. The book is a futuristic\, apocalyptic western-thriller\, which is highly influenced by film\, graphic novels and popular culture. Barry’s writing is brilliantly vivid\, his style darkly humorous\, in the mould of Flann O’Brien. A unique and compelling voice\, he has already been described by Irvine Welsh as ‘the most arresting and original writer to emerge from these islands in years’.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/kevin-barry-30-november-2015/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,Reading,short story
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DTSTART;TZID=UTC:20151026T193000
DTEND;TZID=UTC:20151026T210000
DTSTAMP:20260525T130955
CREATED:20151026T171323Z
LAST-MODIFIED:20171123T234325Z
UID:7236-1445887800-1445893200@irishliterarysociety.org
SUMMARY:Raymond Queneau and Dublin 1916 - October 2015
DESCRIPTION:A late addition to the programme to replace the cancelled John Banville appearance we welcome Dr Dennis Duncan to the Society to discuss Raymond Queneau’s 1947 short novel On est toujours trop bon avec les femmes (We Always Treat Women Too Well ) set during the Easter Rising in 1916. The novel was first published as a purported work of pulp fiction by one Sally Mara\, but Queneau’s work is a wonderful example of his sly\, provocative genius. Queneau was a great admirer of Joyce and kept a notebook to document his reading of Ulysses. Duncan describes Queneau’s erotic and playful twists on history and Joyce’s work thus: ‘The protagonists are a band of rebels who occupy a post office in Dublin\, not the GPO\, but another one\, round the corner on Eden Street. In taking over the building\, the rebels either expel or kill all of the post office staff working there ± the clerks\, tellers\, managers and guards ± with the exception of one woman\, one Gertrude Girdle\, otherwise known as Gertie\, who was in the loo when it happened. The rebels discover Gertie\, and during the course of a somewhat existential interrogation\, she finds her faith in the infallibility of George V irremediably shaken and sets about undermining the rebels\, sowing confusion and dissent among them by systematically seducing them.’ \nILS Rattlebag\nIn addition to this enjoyable and curious look at the events of 1916 as we approach its centenary we have put together a rattlebag of music\, essays\, poetry and film drawn from the talent of the Society:\n My dearest\, forgive me asking you such a question\, but these rebels\, did they – how shall I put it – did they behave correctly towards you? No\, said Gertie. They tried to lift up my beautiful white dress to look at my ankles.Raymond Queneau - We Always Treat Women Too Well \n  \n\n \nDonal Cox (Fifth Province) – poetry and performance\n \nDr Tony Murray –  Portrayals of the Post-War Irish Navvy in London\n \nNora Connolly  – poems\n \nShevaun Wilder – Song of Wandering Aengus film\n \nEddie Linden – poems\n\nWe will have an opportunity for some questions after the presentations by Dr Duncan and Dr Murray. \nSpeaker:\n Dr Dennis Duncan\nHis books include Theory of the Great Game: Writings from Le Grand Jeu\, which appeared with Atlas Press in 2015\, while an edited collection\, Tom McCarthy: Critical Essays\, is in press with Gylphi. He is currently working on a monograph about the early years of the Parisian literary coterie\, the Oulipo and his current research project concerns the history of the book index. He is also interested in literary translation\, and in the European avant-garde of the twentieth century\, in particular the Oulipo and the Collège de ’Pataphysique.
URL:https://irishliterarysociety.org/event/october-2016-raymond-queneau-and-dublin-1916/
LOCATION:The Bloomsbury Hotel\, The Bloomsbury Hotel\, 16-22 Great Russell Street\, London\, WC1B 3NN \, United Kingdom
CATEGORIES:interview,lecture,poetry,Reading,short story
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