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Friday 22 nd February - Ken Bruen
Friday 1st March - Rosemarie Rowley
Friday 8th March - Selina Guinnes
Friday 15th March - Kathy D'Arcy
Friday 22nd March - David Park
Friday 5th April - Eugene O'Connell
Friday 12th April - Donal Ryan
Friday 19th April - Gerry Murphy |
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Friday 22nd February at 1.05pm
Ken bruen |
Galway-based author Ken Bruen is an enormously prolific, and celebrated author of crime-noir fiction. His many works include the “Jack Taylor” series which began with the Shamus Award -winning The Guards. As the series grew, it garnered many more awards. More recently, a selection of novels from the series have been adapted for a series of TV movies (one which was screened in 2012 and two more to follow in 2013).
Ken’s novel Blitz was also adapted for the screen in 2011 starring Jason Statham, Aiden Gillen and Paddy Considine. In 2010, London Boulevard was turned into a film starring Colin Farrell and Keira Knightley.
Other works include Dispatching Baudelaire, The Killing of the Tinkers, The Magdalen Martyrs, The Dramatistand Priest (nominated for the 2008 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel), all part of his Jack Taylor series, which began with The Guards. Bruen is also the recipient of the first David Loeb Goodis Award (2008) for his dedication to his art.
To find out more about Ken Bruen, visit his website, or check out these two interviews:
A profile with MysteriousPress.com
Irish Crime Writer Ken Bruen on Alcoholism, Sick Priests, and Neo-Nazis (Interview)
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Friday 1st March at 1.05pm
Rosemarie Rowley |
Rosemarie Rowley was born in 1942, and received a Dublin Corporation scholarship in the fifties, when she achieved the highest marks of all entrants in English. After a spell working in the Agricultural Institute, she read Rachel Carson’s “The Silent Spring” and left her job to seek higher education, first teaching in England in the industrial city of Birmingham. She then attended Trinity College Dublin, and has degrees in Irish and English literature, in which she won a Distinction, and philosophy. While at Trinity College in the 1960s she published her first poems. She also studied psychology later on, obtaining a diploma from the National University of Ireland. In the seventies, she worked for a time in the nascent film industry in Ireland, which didn’t really take off until later, and as there were few jobs open to married women in teaching and the Civil Service, she emigrated to Luxembourg where she worked as a European fonctionnaire for a number of years. She took early retirement, and worked as a volunteer coordinator in the Green Alliance, part of the emerging environmental movement in Ireland. During this time she was bringing up her son David, she gained a Master’s in Literature from Trinity College, for her thesis on the long poems of Patrick Kavanagh. To date she has published five books of poetry, not counting a Cold War poetry pamphlet, “Politry” and has four times won the Epic award in the Scottish International Poetry Competition.
“The Sea of Affliction” (1987) one of the first works in eco-feminism, can be accessed and downloaded from the Irish Literary Revival website, under a Creative Commons agreement at: The Irish Literary Revival website
Her most recent books are “Hot Cinquefoil Star” (2002) and “In Memory of Her” (2004) and (2008) both published by Rowan Tree Press, Dublin
“A master of form” – Brendan Kennelly
“Her voice is one of heart-breaking beauty” – Roz Cowman
“Originality, commitment, and real literary ability” Eilean Ni Chuilleanain
“I like the poems..I keep hearing something in them that I’m always listening for..and rarely catch” – Ted Hughes
“Her range of vocabulary and phrasing is impressive...a true poet….her finest poems wear their learning lightly – she excels as a critic” – Declan Kiberd
“Lyrics of a rare strength and delicacy” John McGahern |
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Friday 8th March at 1.05pm
Selina Guinness |
Selina Guinness was born, and grew up, in Dublin. She lectures in English literature in the Department of Humanities at the Institute of Art, Design and Technology (IADT), Dun Laoghaire. In 2002, she moved to Tibradden, her uncle's house in the Dublin Mountains where she continues to live with her husband, children and a flock of sheep.
Her memoir The Crocodile by the Door, her first novel novel, recounts the trials and tribulations of farming valuable land on the edge of Dublin at the height of the property boom. Published in 2012 by Penguin it has since received widespread critical acclaim and was shortlisted for both the 2012 Costa biography award and the Sunday Independent Newcomer of the Year. Selina has also edited an anthology of Irish poetry published by Bloodaxe, The New Irish Poets. She lectures in Irish literature at Dun Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology. She lives at Tibradden with her husband, their children, and a lot of sheep.
“...A memoir so exceptional that it deserves to be ranked as the Irish Book of the Year, regardless of category.”
Irish Independent.
“Out of the complexities of attachment, and out of a knowledge, hard-won, of what true dereliction is, Guinness has written a remarkable book,”
Belinda McKeown The Guardian.
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Friday 15th March at 1.05pm
Kathy D'Arcy |
Kathy D'Arcy is writer in residence with Cork literary organisation Tigh Fili (Poets' House). Her first collection, Encounter, was published by Lapwing Publications in 2010, and a second, The Wild Pupil, was published by Bradshaw Books in 2012. She currently studies and teaches Irish women's literature, runs writing workshops (www.kathydarcy.com) and works with homeless teenagers, but she originally qualified and worked as a doctor. She is also a playwright; her plays 'Retreat' and 'This is my Constitution' have been staged in Cork, and the latter appeared recently at a Dail Eireann briefing on constitutional change. This year she was awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary to develop her third collection. |
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Friday 22nd March at 1.05pm
David Park |
David Park has written one collection of short stories and seven novels. His novel The Truth Commissioner, described by Joseph O’ Connor as yielding “moments of heart-shivering beauty”, was awarded the Christopher Ewart-Biggs Prize. He has also received the American Ireland Literary Fund Award and a Major Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. His current novel The Light of Amsterdam was shortlisted for Eason Novel of the Year at the 2012 Bord Gáis Energy Irish Book Awards.
“…the humanity of Park's writing is such that even at the most prosaic of moments, unique insights quiver into life.”
Steve Davies The Guardian
“David Park writes prose of gravity and grace,”
Joseph O’Connor, The Guardian
David Park: a life in books An Interview with Ian Sansom |
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Friday 5th April at 1.05pm
Eugene O' Connell |
Eugene O’Connell was born near Kiskeam in northwest Cork in 1951. He has published a number of chapbooks, one full collection of poems, One Clear Call (Bradshaw Books, 2003), and one book of translations, Flying Blind (Southword Editions), which was volume 12 of the Cork European City of Culture Translation Series. Diviner, a new collection of his poems, was published by Three Spires Press in 2009. He is editor of The Cork Literary Review.
“Behind the plain speech is a reflective intelligence that recalls ordinary people and events. His modest manner is accompanied by a shrewd intelligence and a technique attuned to the poet’s sensibility.”
Maurice Harmon |
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Friday 12th April at 1.05pm
Donal Ryan |
Donal Ryan was born in a village in North Tipperary, a stroll from the shores of Lough Derg. His first novel, The Spinning Heart, co-published by The Lilliput Press and Doubleday Ireland, won both Newcomer of the Year and the overall Book of the Year at the Bord Gais Irish Book Awards 2012. His second, The Thing About December, will be published in September 2013. Donal lives close to Limerick city with his wife and two young children.
The Spinning Heart BORD GAIS ENERGY BOOK OF THE YEAR 2012
“Sometimes people say, having praised a debut novel, that they look forward to what the writer does next, as if there is always room for improvement. Given a novel as brilliantly realised as The Spinning Heart, I see no reason to look anywhere but the present. For Donal Ryan, the future is now.”
Declan Hughes, The Independent
“…a first novel that's … up-to-date in its concerns but that also transcends the merely topical in its bleak, if often savagely funny, vision of a rural Ireland”
John Boland The Independent
Click here to see Donal reading from The Spining Heart at Kenny’s Bookshop, Galway. |
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Friday 19th April at 1.05pm
Gerry Murphy |
Gerry Murphy was born in Cork in 1952. He has published seven collections of poetry, including End of Part One: New and Selected Poems (2006) and My Flirtation with International Socialism (2010). In 2008 his work was adapted for actors and musicians by Crazy Dog Audio Theatre as The People’s Republic of Gerry Murphy. He also published a volume of versions of the Polish poet Katarzyna Borun-Jagodzinska (2005).
“Murphy’s poetry is of that apparently-effortless kind that offers the pleasures of instant recognition and the consolation of certainty of touch.”
Fiona Sampson, The Irish Times |
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Admission is free to the readings at the Irish Writers' Centre but donations are very welcome. To reserve your seat, call or email the Centre.
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