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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 ...
Joining us at the start of the ILS 2022-23 season are the poet James Conor Patterson and writer Darran Anderson to launch Patterson's book bandit country. bandit country is the much-anticipated debut collection from James Conor Patterson, who will be familiar to ILS regulars from our event last year launching his anthology of essays on the Irish border: The New ...
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 ...
New York in the late 1960s: Mae escapes a run-down an apartment, an alcoholic mother and her mother’s occasional boyfriend to a new life as a typist for Andy Warhol, transcribing conversations with his friends and associates to provide the material for an unconventional novel. A mordantly funny investigation of celebrity, obsession, womanhood and sexuality, Nothing Special (Bloomsbury) is itself ...
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, ...
Last year we engaged with Poetry Ireland and the Poetry as Commemoration project in UCD to develop workshops which used poetry as a means to deepen our collective understanding of Ireland’s past and to explore a challenging period of history relating to the War of Independence and Civil War. The three workshops were delivered by Roisin Tierney and Ian Duhig ...
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 ...
We are delighted to kick off 2024 with a collaboration with our friends at the Irish Cultural Centre, Hammersmith, home to many of our events over recent years. Martin Doyle will be joining us not in his more familiar capacity as the Literary Editor of the Irish Times but as an author in his own right. His Dirty Linen – ...
This event brings together the poets Thomas McCarthy and Virginia Keane Brownlow in conversation with Dorothy Allen to reflect on the life and writing of Molly Keane. Molly Keane was born Molly Skrine in Co Kildare in 1904, part of what she herself described as "a rather serious hunting, fishing church going family". Her mother, Moira O'Neill was a well ...
Join us on Friday 24 Jan for our first event of 2025. We are delighted to welcome back Professor Declan Kiberd to the Society to discuss the life and poetry of Aogán Ó Rathaille (c.1670–1729) and to launch a book by long time ILS member Brian O'Connor of a selection of the poems. Conveying Ó Rathaille's intricate rhythms and rhyme ...
