Thursday 9th May at 7.30pm

Jennifer Johnston, Dermot Bolger & Mary Costello

-In Conversation-

Gathering around the table these three writers will discuss their work and ponder what the concerns for different generations of writers are - do they differ over time?

This event is part of the 2013 Bealtaine Festival In keeping with theme of this year's festival; the Irish Writers' Centre will celebrate "growth, spring and positivity by focusing on the sharing of influences and experiences.

As well as at shared looking literary influences, the trio will explore how writers engage with contemporary issues from different perspectives. These are issues like the economy (the "Boom-Bust Cycle"), aging and health. Writing has proven itself to be a powerful tool with which to share experience and communicate accumulated wisdom across the generations - we hope to tap it into this rich vein. Any instance of sharing insight is all to the good, providing as it does the entire community with the perspective necessary to face up to the today's challenges.

Tickets: €5
Call the Centre on 01-8721302 to book

Online Bookings through Paypal 

Jennifer Johnston is one of the foremost Irish writers of her generation.  She has won the Whitbread Prize, the Evening Standard Best First Novel Award, the Yorkshire Post Award, and the Best Book of the Year award on two occasions and has won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Irish Book Awards. She has also been shortlisted for the Booker Prize with Shadows on our Skin. Her other novels include Truth or Fiction, Foolish Mortals, The Gingerbread Woman, Two Moons and Shadowstory.

Dermot Bolger is one of Ireland’s best known writers. Born in Dublin in 1959, the poet, playwright and novelist Dermot Bolger has also worked as a factory hand, library assistant and publisher. His novels include The Journey Home and A Second Life. In 2012 Dermot’s eighth poetry collection The Venice Suite: A Voyage Through Loss was published, as was his latest novella, The Fall of Ireland. His stage adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses is staged this autumn in Dublin’s Project Art Centre as well as in Glasgow, Belfast and Cork.
In more recent time Dermot has been involved in a series of plays which were both set in and performed in the Dublin working class suburb of Ballymun, which has the innovative Axis Arts and Community Resource Centre at its hub.

Mary Costello is originally from Galway and now lives in Dublin. Her stories have been anthologised and published in New Irish Writing and in The Stinging Fly. She was shortlisted for a Hennessy New Irish Writing Award in the 1990s and was a finalist in the Narrative Short Story Competition (USA, Spring 2010) and in Glimmer Train’s Open Fiction Competition (USA, June 2011). She received a bursary from the Irish Arts Council in 2011. The China Factory (Stinging Fly Press) is her first book of stories and was published to widespread critical acclaim in May 2012.