Reading 5

Irish Writers' Centre reading on Tuesday 15th November at 7.30pm

Liam Carson was born in 1962. His father, the late Liam Mac Carráin, was well-known as a postman, Irish-language and Esperantoactivist, writer and much-loved storyteller. Liam studied English literature and philosophy at UCD, where he was a students' union councillor and auditor of the Contemporary Music Society. During the 1980s he lived in squats in Brixton and Kennington in London and worked as a civil servant, labourer, dishwasher and painter and decorator. Liam is the director and founder of the IMRAM Irish Language Literature Festival, which reveals the diversity of modern Irish language literature through imaginative and eclectic events. Over the past twenty years, Liam has also worked as a literary publicist for many Irish publishers—including Lilliput, Blackstaff, Wolfhound, Mercier, and Cois Life. Authors he has worked with include Paul Durcan, John Waters, the late John Moriarty, Ken Bruen, Liam Ó Muirthile, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne, Fionnuala O Connor and Jonathan Bardon. His reviews, critical articles, essays and poems have appeared in a wide range of periodicals, including Poetry Ireland Review, Fortnight, The Irish Review, New Hibernia Review, Comhar, An Guth, Irish Examiner and Sunday Tribune. He lives in Dublin with his partner, Niamh Lawlor, a puppeteer, and their daughter, Eithne.

In 2010 Hag's Head Press published Call Mother a Lonely Field a critically acclaimed memoir by Liam Carson which mines the emotional archaeology of family, home and language, our attempts to break their tethers, and the refuge we take within them. For more reviews

"In this perfect gem of a memoir Liam Carson invites us into an Irish-speaking family home that was a bastion against the evils of imperialism, both cultural and material. Liam Óg's story is one of setting out and return. For him, as for his father, Ithaca is not a place but a language. Like Hugo Hamilton's The Speckled People, this memoir is a must-read."
-Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill

"Carson's book is a lyrical prose poem about being one of the first generation of Belfast children to be actually raised - reluctantly at times - with Irish"
-Pól Ó Muirí, Irish Times.com

Henry McDonald is the Ireland Correspondent of The Guardian and The Observer. He has been a journalist for almost 25 years and has worked for, among others, The Sunday Times, Evening Press, Irish News, BBC Northern Ireland and Channel 5 News.

His articles have also appeared in GQ magazine, The Spectator, Welt am Sonntag in Germany. An author of seven critically acclaimed non fiction books  Irishbatt: Story of Ireland's Blue Berets in the Lebanon, INLA: Deadly Divisions, UVF: The Endgame, Trimble: a biography, The UDA: Inside the Heart of Loyalist Terror, Colours: Ireland - From Bombs to Boom, Gunsmoke & Mirrors. He is a regular contributor on RTE, Newstalk, BBC Radio 5 Live, Newsnight and Prime Time. He has also covered a number of conflicts as well as the Northern Ireland Troubles including the Middle East and the first Gulf War.

Ivy Bannister has excelled in many genres having written short stories, plays, poetry, a memoir, and a novel. For her stories, she has received both the Francis MacManus and Hennessy awards.  A collection of short stories, Magician, was published in 1996; and numerous other stories have been published and broadcast, among them, What Big Teeth, which was filmed as Forgetting Aphrodite in 2004. Her plays have been produced on stage and radio in Ireland, the UK and Germany, among them, ‘The Wilde Circus Show’ (Delaware, Proscenium Press, 1990). Ivy has also written a book of poetry Vinegar and Spit (Astrolabe Press)