The 45th Annual Clifden Arts Festival takes place from 15th-25th September 2022 in Clifden, Co Galway. It is the longest-running community arts festival in Ireland and is host to literary, musical and visual art content which will have the community arts of Clifden and the surrounding hinterland as a central focus with creative writing, music, theatre and film workshops and performances taking place in the local schools for the duration of the festival.
Authors from The Gallery Press taking part in this year’s are Vona Groarke who will be reading with Bernard O’Donoghue and Molly Twomey reading with Paddy Bushe.
3.00pm Friday
16 September
Vona Groarke and Bernard O’Donoghue
Station House Theatre, Clifden, Galway
Book Tickets
3.00pm Wednesday
21 September
Molly Twomey and Paddy Bushe
Station House Theatre, Clifden, Galway
Book Tickets
With music by James Canavan
Bernard O’Donoghue grew up in Cullen, Co Cork, and still spends part of the year there. Since 1965 he has lived in Oxford, where he taught Medieval English literature and Irish poetry at Wadham College. Bernard has published eight volumes of poems, the most recent being The Seasons of Cullen Church (Faber 2016). He is working on an edition of the Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney.
Vona Groarke has published twelve books with The Gallery Press, including eight poetry collections, the latest being Link: Poet and World (2021). Her Selected Poems won the 2017 Pigott Prize for Best Irish Poetry Collection. Later this year, New York University Press will publish Hereafter: The Telling Life of Ellen O’Hara, an account of Irish women domestic servants in 1890s New York. She has taught at the University of Manchester since 2007. She will become Poet in Residence at St. John’s College of Cambridge University this year. Otherwise, she lives in South County Sligo, where she reads and writes.
Molly Twomey has been published in Poetry Ireland Review, Banshee, the Irish Times, Crannóg, Mslexia, Cyphers, The Stinging Fly, and elsewhere. She has won the Padraic Colum Poetry Prize (2019), the Waterford Poetry Prize (2020), the Eavan Boland Mentorship Award (2021) and was chosen for Poetry Ireland’s Introductions Series (2021). She runs an online international poetry event, Just to Say, sponsored by Jacar Press. Recently awarded an Arts Council Literature Bursary, her debut collection, Raised Among Vultures was published in May with The Gallery Press. Born in Dublin in 1948,
Paddy Bushe lives in Kerry and is a poet, editor and translator in both Irish and English. He has published thirteen collections of poetry, and five books of translations into and from Irish, including the collected poems of Somhairle MacGill-Eain. He edited the anthology Voices at the World’s Edge: Irish Poets on Skellig Michael (Dedalus, 2010). The recipient of the Oireachtas prize for poetry in 2006, he also received the 2006 Michael Hartnett Poetry Award and the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His most recent books are Peripheral Vision, a collection in English, and Second Sight, a selection of his poems in Irish with his own translations, which were published by Dedalus in 2020. He is a member of Aosdána.
