Literature

Guest speaker Gabriel Fitzmaurice.

Clifden Arts Festival is honoured to welcome back these two old friends of the Festival. They continue to produce poetry that touches the heart and lifts the spirit.

Terry McDonagh, poet and theatre-maker, facilitates and takes part in writing programmes in Europe, Asia and Australia. He taught creative writing at Hamburg University and was Drama Director at International School Hamburg. He's published eleven poetry collections, letters, drama, prose and poetry for young people. His work has been translated into German and Indonesian. His forthcoming collection 'Two Notes for Home' is to be published in September by Arlen House.

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.

This vibrant group had a busy year including the launch of a wonderful memoir, a poetry prize and 2 members selected for Poetry Ireland's 'Introductions'. Their 3 most recent broadcasts on Connemara Community Radio range from heart-moving memoir and short stories to Poetry with music.

Everyone is welcome to share in this wonderful hour of story and verse with musical accompaniment.

Oein DeBhairduin is a creative soul with a passion for poetry, folk herbalism and preserving the beauty of Traveller tales, sayings, retellings and historic exchanges. He is the manager of an education centre and a long-time board member of several Mincéirí community groups, including the honour of being vice-chair of the Irish Traveller Movement and a council member of Mincéir Whidden. He seeks to pair community activism with cultural celebration, recalling old tales with fresh modern connections. Most of all, he wishes to rekindle the hearth fires of a shared kinship.

Margaret Atwood, whose work has been published in more than 45 countries, is the author of more than 50 books of fiction, poetry, critical essays, and graphic novels. Burning Questions, a collection of essays from 2004 to 2021, was published in March 2022. Her latest novel, The Testaments, is a co-winner of the 2019 Booker Prize. It is the long-awaited sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, now an award-winning TV series.

She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, the Franz Kafka International Literary Prize, the PEN Center USA Lifetime Achievement Award, and the Los Angeles Times Innovator’s Award.

Elaine Feeney is a writer from Galway and lectures at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project. She has published three poetry collections, including The Radio was Gospel & Rise. Her debut novel, As You Were, won the 2021 Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, Kate O’ Brien Prize, The Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize, and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and the Rathbones-Folio Prize.

Author, wit and raconteur Michael Chapman Pincher talks to Lilliput Press publisher Antony Farrell about how an old diary revitalised his joy of storytelling. He tells how guerrilla marketing tactics have allowed him to take on the cosy, close-knit English media world by writing Long Lost Log, a best seller they can't ignore.