Readings in IADT

One of my residency tasks is to run a series of readings in IADT. This will kick off on Wednesday 16 November with my own inaugural reading, and this will be followed by four subsequent readings, each of which will involve a poet and a prose writer.The readings are presented by Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown Council, IADT and Poetry Ireland. The full schedule will be posted here in due course. In the meantime, here are a couple of pre-Christmas dates:


Wednesday, 16 November: Inaugural Reading with Writer in Residence Peter Sirr.

Wednesday, 7 December: Readings with Hugo Hamilton and Julie O'Callaghan.

Hugo Hamilton was born in Dublin of Irish-German parentage. He has brought elements of his dual identity to his novels Surrogate City (London, Faber & Faber,1990); The Last Shot (Faber & Faber, 1991); and The Love Test (Faber & Faber, 1995) His stories were collected as Dublin Where the Palm Trees Grow (Faber & Faber, 1996. His later novels are Headbanger (London, Secker & Warburg, 1996); and Sad Bastard (Secker & Warburg, 1998). He has also published a memoir of his Irish-German childhood, The Speckled People (London, Fourth Estate, 2003). In 1992, he was awarded the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature. He lives in Dublin.

Julie O'Callaghan was born in Chicago in 1954 and has lived in Ireland since 1974. Her collections of poetry for adults include Edible Anecdotes (Dublin, Dolmen, 1983), which was a London Poetry Society Recommendation; What's What (Newcastle Upon Tyne, Bloodaxe Books, 1991); and No Can Do (Bloodaxe Books, 2000), which was a London Poetry Book Society Choice. Her poems for older children have appeared in numerous anthologies in the UK, including the New Oxford Book of Children's Verse, and in school texts in Ireland, England, and Canada. Her children's poems are collected in Bright Lights Blaze Out (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986); Cambridge Contemporary Poets 2 (Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press, 1992), and in two full-length collections, Taking My Pen for a Walk (London, Orchard, 1988); and Two Banks (Bloodaxe Books, 1988). Her new collection for children will be published by Faber in 2006. She has received the Michael Hartnett Prize for poetry and is a member of the Irish academy of arts, Aosdána.