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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 ...
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 ...
The Irish Literary Society in association with the Irish Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University, present a reflection on the Irish Literary Revival (1891-1922). Irish 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 ...
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. 'Gleeson directs her gaze back like a literary archaeologist who has excavated the archives and unearthed treasures for the short ...
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 ...
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. MacLaverty 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 ...
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.' ...
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 ...
The 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 ...
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. The 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 ...
