| Date | Saturday March 27th |
| Venue | Online |
| Time | 4pm |
| Cost | €5 - €10 |
| Age | Adult |
The Festival Bookseller for this event is Books Upstairs.
We are delighted to welcome Mountains to Sea stalwarts, poets and friends John McAuliffe and Martina Evans. John will read from The Kabul Olympics, described as a book of impossible places, the poems pit individual lives and ordinary days and hours and minutes against the sweeping historical events and catastrophes which would sweep them away. In Martina Evans's new collection American Mules, we revisit familiar places with her — the radiography units of hospitals and their merciless work culture, in which the speakers must survive; a London densely populated by both human and animal characters whose colours and aspect she brilliantly evokes, and Burnfort, County Cork, with its bars and gossip and childhood complications, a subject of her lyrics. The eponymous Mules are shoes brought to her as an exotic gift by an American relation. They suggest to her the possibility of a very different world, one which the poems' speakers set out to explore.
John McAuliffe grew up in County Kerry, Ireland. The Gallery Press has published his five collections: A Better Life (2002), which was shortlisted for a Forward Prize in 2002; Next Door (2007); Of All Places (2011), which was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation; The Way In (2015), which was joint winner of the Michael Hartnett Award; and The Kabul Olympics. McAuliffe teaches poetry at the University of Manchester's Centre for New Writing.
Martina Evans grew up in County Cork and trained in Dublin as a radiographer before moving to London in 1988. She is the author of twelve books poetry and prose. She has won several awards including the Premio Ciampi International Prize for Poetry in 2011. Now We Can Talk Openly About Men (Carcanet 2018) was shortlisted for the 2019 Irish Times Poetry Now Award, the Pigott Poetry Prize and the Roehampton Poetry Prize and was an Observer, TLS and Irish Times Book of the Year in 2018. Mountainy Men, a narrative poem, was the recipient of a Grants for the Arts Award in 2015. She is a Royal Literary Fund Advisory Fellow and reviews for The Irish Times.
We welcome Maureen Kennelly who will host Two Poets. She is Director of The Arts Council, former Director of Poetry Ireland and in ‘the long ago’ , curator of Mountains to Sea dlr Book Festival.
