The writer Maeve Binchy has died following a short illness, aged 72.
he writer Maeve Binchy has died following a short illness, aged 72. Ms Binchy sold more than 40 million books worldwide. Some of her work was also adapted for screen including the 1995 film Circle of Friends. A journalist, short story writer and best-selling novelist, Maeve Binchy was born in Dalkey in Co Dublin and studied at UCD. She initially worked as a teacher before becoming a journalist, columnist and later women's editor at the Irish Times.
Scenes from Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats, directed by Susan Shaughnessy University of Oklahoma March 10–14, 2012
Photos: Ty Johnson / The Oklahoma Daily
Marina Carr’s 1998 play, By the Bog of Cats, was the third collaboration between World Literature Today and the Peggy Dow Helmrich School of Drama under my direction. The play was produced in celebration of the Puterbaugh Festival in honor of the 2012 Puterbaugh fellow, Irish playwright Marina Carr. Carr was in attendance at the opening night of the play (March 10, 2012), which closed the festival.
Marina Carr is an influential voice in contemporary drama in Ireland and beyond. Born in 1964, Carr grew up in County Offaly and studied English and philosophy at University College Dublin, where she later focused her graduate studies on the work of Samuel Beckett. To date, Carr has written sixteen plays, and she is now considered—along with Brian Friel—one of Ireland’s most important playwrights since Beckett.
(Tóibín’s article appeared in Bomb, Summer 2012; the clip above is Murphy with Sean Rocks.) In Ireland in the 1980s, when I was starting to write, there was a relationship between the Irish theater and its audience that was raw,...
I found Carrying the Songs a great introduction to your poetry. It displays the elegance of your poems, your strong, sensual connection to nature, and your musicality in both subject matter and technique. There is tremendous musicality in your poems and music is often a subject or symbol. It is obvious that you have a deep personal relationship with rhythm and sound. In “Violin,” you use musical instruments as a metaphor for people: “which welds dark and light into one deep tone, / which plays us, reluctant, into music.”
T he Anglo-Irish journalist William Howard Russell’s account of the Crimean War, on which Ciaran Carson draws in his Forward Prizewinning collection Breaking News (2003), begins with an acknowledgement of the “terrible romance” of war. “We may deprecate it as the worst of evils”, he writes, “but there is an indescribable fascination in its bloody records”. Carson’s seven-part sequence “The War Correspondent”, his version of the appalling, chaotic violence of the Crimean campaign, bears out Russell’s point, although today the names with which these poems are punctuated – Serbia, Crimea, Balkan – are likely to suggest the imperial ambitions themselves, rather than the horror of the wars fought to further them. This is, perhaps, especially true for a writer born and brought up in Belfast
AT THE top of Dalysfort Road, as in several other Galway city locations, there is a particular spot which offers a panoramic view of Galway Bay that is as spectacular as any such like vista on this planet.
Composer Richard Wargo feels a connection to the lyrical quality of Irish literature...“I’ve always loved the storytelling and the language,” said Wargo, artistic director of The Sembrich. “More contemporary writing often has a cynical slant. No matter how extravagant the subject matter, Irish storytelling is done with a clear eye — that type of drama is a natural for music. The language is so colorful and the characters are so rich.”
For anyone who loves Irish music and poetry, this is the album for you.Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains and John Montague, celebrated Irish poet, have released their collaboration, The Wild Dog Rose, an album of poetry and Irish music. This album is a long time coming, something both Moloney and Montague discussed as far back as the 1960s.
Irish poet and playwright Paula Meehan speaks with poet Michael Collier about her inner city Dublin childhood, her education, her poetry and her work in women's prisons. Meehan reads "My Father Perceived as a Vision of St. Francis," "The Ghost of my Mother Comforts Me," and "Dharmakaya." Carol Ann Duffy, Britain's poet laureate, says: "Paula Meehan is that rare and precious thing, a vocational poet of courage and integrity."
The Wheeler Centre is a new kind of cultural institution, dedicated to the discussion and practice of writing, books and ideas. The Centre is a cornerstone of Melbourne’s UNESCO City of Literature status.
During this video interview , Doyle reads from short story collection Bullfighting, discusses the compilation’s middle-aged protagonists and why its stories didn’t become novels; he explains the prominence of Cadbury’s in his work, describes writing The Commitments, capturing the vernacular (without eavesdropping) and responding to bad reviews.
Alison Wells discusses Ancient Light with one of the masters of modern literature, John Banville...Ancient Light is John Banville’s seventeenth literary novel in a career spanning forty two years. He has been literary editor at the Irish times, The Book of Evidence was shortlisted for the Booker prize and his last novel The Sea won it. In 2011 he won the Franz Kafka prize. Ancient Light has been described by The Independent as ‘bedazzling’ and by the Emer O’ Kelly at The Irish Independent as being as much about “the uncertainty of memory as anything else.”
Irish author Dermot Healy tells Sean O'Hagan how his latest novel was shaped largely by what he decided to leave out...There are moments during my interview with Dermot Healy when it feels like I am talking to one of his fictional characters, perhaps Tom "The Blackbird" Feeney, who flits in and out of the strange, spiralling narrative of Long Time, No See, the Irish author's startling new novel.
Máire Mhac an tSaoi is widely considered to be one of the most important Irish-language poets alive.Now 90 years old, she has lived a remarkable life -- she was the first woman to be called to the bar in Ireland and also the first woman to make it into the department of diplomatic affairs through public competition.
Thomas Kinsella's selected works are full of scalpel-sharp musings still inspire, says David Wheatley.
Kinsella devotees are forced to go through some awkward preliminaries: yes he does matter, yes he is at least as important as Heaney, and yes he offers the reader rich and varied pleasures.
Full casting has been announced for the Old Vic's new production of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen's play, presented in an adaptation by Brian Friel, is directed by Anna Mackmin.beginning performances Sept. 5 prior to an official opening Sept. 12.
Poet Mary O'Malley chats with Des Kenny about her wonderful new Collection of Poetry, Valparaiso in Kennys Bookshop, May 2012. Mary also reads several of the...
If you tread softly, it’s easy to sneak up on and be amazed by an almost forgotten Ireland, co-writer and star of Silence, Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, tells TARA BRADY...There is another way. This weekend, Silence will descend on selected cinemas. The latest film from veteran documentarian Pat Collins follows a young sound engineer, returning to Ireland after a 15-year absence, as he seeks out the country’s quietest landscapes. Our hero’s Luddite-friendly mission to escape all man-made sound takes him to Inishbofin, Galtymore, the Burren, Connemara, Ballycroy and Tory Island.
The cinema, in turn, is transformed into a contemplative, otherworldly space.
“It’s pared back,” nods Eoghan Mac Giolla Bhríde, Silence’s star and co-writer.
John Montague is virtually Ireland’s poet laureate. His best poems are all autobiographical . . . Splinter-sharp, they go straight to the heart and catch in the memory like burrs.’ — John Carey, The Sunday Times.
John Montague has been long esteemed, in Ireland and abroad, as the maker of poems and books which have assumed iconic status. Titles and phrases from them have entered the lexicon of the nation.
New Collected Poems opens with three major ‘orchestrations’, The Rough Field (1972), The Great Cloak (1978) and The Dead Kingdom (1984)
John Boyne's stunning "The Absolutist" (Other Press, 320 pages, $16.96 trade paperback) is an anti-war novel, set during the First World War and thereafter, but it's so much more.
It's the story of the friendship between two teen-age English soldiers, London butcher's son Tristan Sadler, and Norwich vicar's son William (Will) Bancroft, their experiences in basic training in 1916 at Aldershot under brutal Sgt. James Clayton and their ordeal in the trenches of Northern France.
Sebastian Barry's fifth novel is a lyrical evocation of trauma and exile, bearing a seemingly endless series of potent images, writes Alex Clark...In his fifth novel, Sebastian Barry takes up the story of another of the Dunnes, the family whose members have appeared in Annie Dunne and A Long, Long Way and in his play The Steward of Christendom. Eighty-nine-year-old Lilly Bere recounts the events of her life as though mesmerised by the vivid incompleteness of a remembered dream; in this, although her grasp is surer and her memories less fantastical, she resembles the narrator-protagonist of Barry's award-winning previous novel, The Secret Scripture.
The former director of the Project has been tasked with sustaining the breadth and impact of the Dublin Theatre Festival with reduced means.Taken together with several new plays by Declan Hughes at the Gate (The Last Summer), Emma Donoghue for Landmark (Hatch) and the Dublin Theatre Festival at Project (the Maeve Brennan-inspired Talk of the Town), Deirdre Kinahan at Smock Alley (Halcyon Days), Gary Duggan at the Peacock (Shibari), and director Neil Bartlett’s new adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray for the Abbey, the diversity of the programme responds to the audience’s variegated interests, and it may demonstrate a deeper consideration of the city.
When Colum McCann came to the U.S. from Ireland in the early 1980s, he set out on a cross-country bicycle trip to get to know his new country and its stories. He's spent the years since telling those tales through prose.
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