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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 ...
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 ...
Polly Devlin joins Joan Bakewell to discuss the latest collection of her work, Writing Home, and to reflect on a rich career as a writer, her working as features editor of Vogue in London in the Swinging Sixties, to encounters with Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Barbara Streisand, John Lennon...In the pieces brought together in Writing Home, Polly Devlin OBE, covers ...
THIS EVENT HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS. THE EVENT WILL RUN IN OUR 2020-21 SEASON. The scholar Meidhbhín Ní Úrdail visits the Society to deliver our joint annual Noel O'Connell memorial talk with the Irish Texts Society. Her subject is Thomas O’Connor (alias Tomás Ó Conchubhair, b. 1798), originally from the civil parish of Templemolaga, Co. ...
In this centenary year of the publication of Ulysses we are delighted to welcome David Collard back to the Society with his new book, Multiple Joyce: One Hundred Short Essays About James Joyce's Cultural Legacy (Sagging Meniscus Press, June 2022). Springing from the essays we'll have discussion, song, readings and music to mark the UK launch of the book and ...
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 ...
We're delighted to welcome back Jess Kidd to the Society to discuss her novel, The Night Ship. The novel is based on the extraordinary story of the Batavia, the flagship of the Dutch East India Company that in 1628 was wrecked on Morning Reef, on the Houtman Abrolhos islands off western coast of Australia. Its wrecking was followed by factions ...
Mark O’Connell’s latest book, A Thread of Violence, concerns the murders committed by Malcolm Macarthur in 1982 of a nurse, Bridie Gargan, and a farmer, Dónal Dunne. It is both an utterly compelling account of one of Ireland's most notorious crimes and an interrogation of the nature of true crime writing itself. When Macarthur, the heir to a small fortune, ...
The Annual Noel O'Connell Memorial Lecture, a joint venture of the Irish Literary Society and Irish Texts Society will be delivered by Dr. Mary MacDiarmada on 'Art O'Brien and Irish Nationalism in London, 1900-25'. London-born and reared, Art O’Brien’s journey from wealthy electrical engineer to leader of Irish militant nationalism in London was, by any measure, quite extraordinary. In her ...
Join us for the London launch of a fascinating new work by Dr Ellen McWilliams. Resting Places: On Wounds, War and the Irish Revolution could be read as a memoir or a collection of personal essays, but it is neither – literary scholar Lucy McDiarmid describes it as 'the creation of a new literary form'. Resting Places offers up an ...
