The Future Always
Makes Me So Thirsty:
New Poets From The
North Of Ireland
Edited By Sinéad Morrissey
and Stephen Connolly
With Ruth Madoc
& Leo Aylen
Crescent Arts Centre
Sunday 19 June – 7pm
Tickets: £6/£4
Crescent Arts Centre
Sunday 19 June – 8.30pm
Tickets: £8/£6
Northern Irish poetry has an unrivalled
reputation worldwide. Seamus Heaney,
Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon and Sinéad
Morrissey are just a few of the stellar talents
to have emerged from the North.
Blackstaff Press has always been at the
forefront of celebrating this rich poetic talent
in its landmark anthologies. The future
always makes me so thirsty: New Poets from
the North of Ireland continues this tradition,
bringing together a new generation of poets
who have come to prominence in the last
decade.
This event brings together a select group of
the featured poets to read from an anthology
which shows why another generation of
poets from Northern Ireland looks set to
dominate the world stage for years to come.
64
The Trouble With
Women Is Men
Sinéad Morrissey has published five
collections of poetry with Carcanet Press,
including Parallax (2013), which won the
TS Eliot Prize and was shortlisted for
the Forward Prize for Best Collection,
2013. Her other awards include The
Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Eithne
and Rupert Strong Award, the Michael
Hartnett Poetry Prize, a Lannan Literary
Fellowship (U.S.A.) and in 2007 her poem
Through the Square Window took first prize
in the UK National Poetry Competition.
In 2013 she was appointed as the Inaugural
Belfast Poet Laureate.
Stephen Connolly was born in Belfast
in 1989 and was educated at Queen’s
University, Belfast. His poems have been
published in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review
and The Irish Review. He has taught at the
Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry.
Leo’s poems are miniature plays in a
variety of settings: a Brixton police station;
Neanderthal Europe; the Cumbrian fells; a
Hampstead drawing-room; Medea mocking
Jason; a fairy-tale garden; a firelight spellcasting. “The underlying connections forging
the whole piece into one great organic entity
are profound and muscular, the earth moves,
stupendous” wrote Simon Callow. Melvyn
Bragg praises the “visceral intellectualism” of
Leo’s latest book, and calls it “a triumph”.
Ruth Madoc, for many years a very familiar
face on television, ever since she won
fans as Gladys Pugh in Hi-De-Hi, a huge
success she repeated with the very different
character of Dafydd’s Mum in Little Britain,
most recently was seen on television as
Mayor Mary Meyer in Stella (Sky 1). She has
many other television credits: Casualty,
Mount Pleasant, Benidorm, Doctors, Big
Top, Mine all Mine, Jack of Hearts, The Pale
Horse, Oliver’s Travels. In the theatre she has
performed Vagina Monologues, and worked,
as actor and singer, in Calendar Girls, Annie,
42nd Street, Pickwick the Musical, and
Gypsy.
In April, 2016, she ran the London Marathon
for Cancer Research UK.
Leo Aylen has published 9 poetry
collections, and has been published in
100 anthologies, winning prizes in Arvon,
Peterloo, and Bridport, competitions. He has
directed a number of films for television,
been nominated for a BAFTA, and co-written
a Hollywood movie Gods & Generals (Warner
Bros 2003). In the theatre he has directed his
own translation of Sophocles’ Antigone, and
written lyrics for musicals & a pantomime.
He has created and performed in many radio
features, and for several years regularly
created poems based on current news
stories for BBC Radio4. He has performed
his poetry extensively in theatres on three
continents, and has appeared in the Royal
Albert Hall, St Paul’s Cathedral, in North
America from New York to San Francisco,
British Columbia to Ontario, and extensively
in Africa, including to an audience of 3000
Zulus on an open hillside. He and his poetry
have been the sole subject of 3 American
nationwide television programmes.
belfastbookfestival.com
65