A Poetry Tour
Of Ireland
Martina Devlin
About Sisterland
Rob Doyle &
Frankie Gaffney
With Kevin Quinn
With Margaret Ward
With Paul McVeigh
Crescent Arts Centre
Monday 13 June – 1.15pm
Tickets: £7 (inc. Light Lunch) / £5 (event only)
Crescent Arts Centre
Monday 13 June – 5.30pm
Tickets: £6/£4
Crescent Arts Centre
Monday 13 June – 7-8pm
Tickets: £6/£4
Follow poet and critic Kevin Quinn as
he introduces and reads over 20 poems
written about places around Ireland.
Among our guides along the way are
Derek Mahon writing about Portrush,
Louis MacNeice on Carrickfergus and, less
well known, Cushendun, Paul Muldoon
on The Burren, Patrick Kavanagh on
Monaghan, Philip Larkin on both Belfast
and Dublin, Michael Longley on Mayo and
the redoubtable Francis Mahony on those
glorious bells of Shandon.
Welcome to Sisterland. A world ruled by
women. A world designed to be perfect.
Dublin Seven is the violent story of Shane,
a small-time dealer. Having just left school
and keen to assert his independence, he
loses himself in the Celtic Tiger nightlife.
Kevin Quinn has published poetry in
anrange of journals in Britain and Ireland.
His talks on poets and poetry have found
audiences in venues such as the Linen Hall
Library, Down and Fermanagh Museums as
well as in schools and colleges.
Here, women and men are kept separate.
Women lead highly controlled and
suffocating lives, while men are subordinate
– used for labour and breeding.
Sisterland’s leaders have been watching
Constance and recognise that she’s special.
Selected to reproduce, she finds herself
alone with a man for the first time. But the
mate chosen for her isn’t what she expected
– and she begins to see a darker side to
Sisterland.
Constance’s misgivings about the regime
mount. Is she the only one who questions
this unequal society, or are there other
doubters?
Martina Devlin is a bestselling author
and award-winning journalist. She started
writing fiction after winning a Hennessy
Literary Award for her first short story in
the 1996, and has won or been shortlisted
for a variety of literary awards including the
Royal Society of Literature’s VS Pritchett
Prize.
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Soon his life is drugs, music and gangsters.
But as the Celtic Tiger ends, so does Shane’s
luck.
Frankie Gaffney came of age in Dublin,
immersed in the city’s underworld. In his
mid-twenties he left this behind attending
Trinity College to study English Literature.
A man roams a Dublin industrial park and
meets a strange vagrant. A woman takes
part in an unusual sleep experiment. A
Nietzsche - obsessed man clings to his
girlfriend’s red shoes.
Layering narratives and splicing fiction with
non-fiction, This is the Ritual tells of the
ecstatic, the desperate and the uncertain.
Rob Doyle’s acclaimed debut, Here Are
the Young Men, was chosen as a book of
the year by the Irish Times, Independent,
Sunday Times and Sunday Business Post,
and shortlisted in the Irish Book Awards.
Up By The Roots
With Sinéad Morrissey,
Piers Hellawell & The Fidelio Trio
Crescent Arts Centre
Monday 13 June – 8.15pm
Tickets: £10/£8
Beethoven - Piano Trio, Op 70 ‘Ghost’
Piers Hellawell/Sinéad Morrissey – Up By
The Roots
Schoenberg - Verklärte Nacht
A highlight of this year’s Festival. Featuring
the Fidelio Trio, poet Sinéad Morrissey
and composer Piers Hellawell, they
present their collaborative work.
Up by the Roots approaches the relation
of music and text in a new way; the
interaction of trio and poetic texts respects,
though later dissolves, the bounds between
these separate territories. Three pieces
for piano trio are interleaved with three
poems. However, such is the volatility, the
alternations become more subversive. As
music seeps into poem and poetry becomes
sound, we move closer to an operatic scena.
The Fidelio Trio have been shortlisted for
the prestigious 2016 Royal Philharmonic
Society Ensemble Award, following a
long collaborative relationship with Piers
Hellawell. It seemed appropriate that,
the Fidelio Trio based in London should
collaborate with an English composer
working in Belfast; the catalyst being
Belfast poet, Sinéad Morrissey.
belfastbookfestival.com
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