| Date | Saturday March 27th |
| Venue | Online |
| Time | 11am |
| Cost | €5 - €10 |
| Age | Adult |
The Festival Bookseller for this event is Books Upstairs.
We meet two poets at the height of their powers, former Ireland Professor of Poetry Paula Meehan for an exploration of her generous collection of selected poems As If By Magic and Tishani Doshi with her new collection A God at the Door. Paula is one of Ireland’s most distinctive poetic voices, her uncompromising engagement with the politics of gender and class, her love of the natural world and her grief at what threatens it, her holistic and visionary impulses to be grateful for her place in creation are hallmarks of her work. Tishani Doshi’s work likewise bestows power on the powerless, deploys beauty to bear trauma and enables the voices of the oppressed to be heard with piercing clarity. Tishani has been described as ‘a witty, wise and clear-eyed novelist, dancer and poet’ who ‘deploys both range and sharp analysis covering issues from the precarious state of the environment to the treatment of women’ in her new collection A God at the Door.
Paula Meehan’s poetry collections in print include Dharmakaya and Painting Rain, from Carcanet Press, Manchester and from Wake Forest University Press, North Carolina. Geomantic, a long poem in 81 parts, published in 2016 by Dedalus Press, received a Cholmondelay Award for Poetry. Music for Dogs: Works for Radio is also available from Dedalus Press. As If By Magic: Selected Poems, published 1st of October, 2020, by Dedalus Press, presents a generous offering of poetry made in the last thirty years. From 2013 to 2016 she was Ireland Professor of Poetry and her lectures from the Chair, Imaginary Bonnets with Real Bees in Them, is published by UCD Press. A collection of critical essays on her poetry and plays, edited by Jody Allen Randolph, was published by the U.S. journal An Sionnach. It can be accessed here at Project MUSE. Awards include the Butler Award of the Irish American Cultural Institute, the Laurence O’Shaughnessy Award, the Denis Devlin Award and the Marten Toonder Award.
Tishani Doshi has published six books of poetry and fiction. Her essays, poems and short stories have been widely anthologized. In 2012 she represented India at a historic gathering of world poets for Poetry Parnassus at the Southbank Centre, London. She is also the recipient of an Eric Gregory Award for Poetry, winner of the All-India Poetry Competition, and her first book, Countries of the Body, won the prestigious Forward Prize for Best First Collection in 2006. Girls Are Coming out of the Woods was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award and a Firecracker Award. Tishani's debut novel, The Pleasure Seekers, was shortlisted for the Hindu Literary Prize and long-listed for the Orange Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. Small Days and Nights, her second novel, has been shortlisted for the Tata Best Fiction Award 2019 and the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2020. She is currently Visiting Professor of Practice, Literature and Creative Writing at New York University, Abu Dhabi.
Doireann Ní Bhriain has had several careers: television and radio presenter and producer, arts manager and consultant, independent radio producer, narrator and voiceover artist and trainer. She has served on many arts boards, among them Business to Arts and the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris. She is currently Chair of Fishamble Theatre Company. She has hosted many arts and literature events over the years, and gets great pleasure from meeting and talking to the creators of the work she enjoys as a reader and a viewer. Apart from her enthusiasm for and involvement in the arts, she is a linguist (bilingual in Irish and English, and a speaker of French and Spanish) a choral singer and a hillwalke r.
