This year’s West Cork Literary Festival takes place from 7-14 July in Bantry, Co Cork. Tickets are on sale now for a programme packed full of choice.
Gallery Press authors participating are:
11 July
Writing the Crisis: Creative Responses to Climate Change
Bantry Library: Free admission
Readings and a public discussion on creative responses to climate change. Contributors to this event include Annemarie Ní Chuirreáin, Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh, Danny Denton, Morgan Ventura, Hannah Daley, Maria Kirrane, Benjamin Gearey and Maureen O’Connor.
11-12 July
Workshop: Thomas McCarthy Poetry as Commemoration – sold out
Poetry as Commemoration engages poetry as a way to deepen our collective understanding of Ireland’s past and to explore a challenging period of history relating to the War of Independence and Civil War. It is an initiative of the Irish Poetry Reading Archive at UCD Library in partnership with Poetry Ireland and Arts Council Northern Ireland.
Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin, County Waterford, in 1954. Educated at the local Convent of Mercy and at University College, Cork, he was a Fellow of the International Writing Program in Iowa in 1978/79. He worked at Cork City Libraries until 2014 when he withdrew to write full-time. He has published ten collections of poetry including The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Last Geraldine Officer (2009), Pandemonium (2016) and Prophecy (2019) as well as two novels and two books of non-fiction. Awards include The Patrick Kavanagh Award, The Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize, The Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Annual Literary Award of the Ireland Funds. A member of Aosdána, he lives in Cork City.
12 July
Raymond Antrobus and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh
An afternoon of poetry with Raymond Antrobus and Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh.
ISL/Irish Sign Language interpretation will be available for this event
Admission: €18
The Maritime Hotel
Raymond Antrobus’ debut collection, The Perseverance, won both Rathbone Folio Prize and the Ted Hughes Award, amongst many other accolades; the poet’s much anticipated second collection, All The Names Given, continues his essential investigation into language, miscommunication, place, and memory. Throughout, All The Names Given is punctuated with [Caption Poems] partially inspired by Deaf sound artist Christine Sun Kim, which attempt to fill in the silences and transitions between the poems, as well as moments inside and outside of them. Direct, open, formally sophisticated, All The Names Given breaks new ground both in form and content: the result is a timely, humane and tender book from one of the most important young poets of his generation.
Tonn Teaspaigh agus Dánta Eile is a new collection of poems by the well-known poet Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh from Kerry. In these poems Ailbhe describes motherhood and the life of a mother raising a young child and gives voice to the experience of women in contemporary life. She challenges many of the outdated narratives about the role of women in society and does so genuinely, patently and lyrically.
Bailiúchán nua dánta leis an bhfile aitheanta Ailbhe Ní Ghearbhuigh as Ciarraí. Sna dánta seo cuireann an file síos ar an mháithreachas agus ar shaol na máthar ag tógáil linbh óig agus tugann sí guth d’eispéireas na mban sa saol comhaimseartha. Tugann sí a dhúshlán de go leor den insint seanchaite atá ann faoi ról na mban sa sochaí agus déanann sí é go fíor, paiteanta agus go liriciúil.
13 July
Hannah Sullivan and Molly Twomey
An evening of poetry with Hannah Sullivan and Molly Twomey in partnership with Poetry Ireland. This special event will explore, through conversation and reading, the common ground between two poets of different poetry generations and places.
Admission: €20
The Maritime Hotel
Hannah Sullivan’s first collection, Three Poems, won the T. S. Eliot Prize and the inaugural John Pollard International Poetry Prize. Was It for This continues that book’s project, offering a trenchant exploration of the ways in which we attempt to map our lives in space and time.
Molly Twomey is a formidable new talent. Her first collection, Raised Among Vultures, was published in 2022 by The Gallery Press. It won the Southword Debut Collection Poetry Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize for a First Collection and the Farmgate National Poetry Award.
