Poetry and Literature

Seamus Heaney is unquestionably the most important and feted Irish poet since WB Yeats, with the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1995 acknowledging his huge international stature.

The strength of Northern Ireland’s poetry scene will be celebrated in Washington at a gala event, A Shower of Rhyming Couplets, on April 18. Poets taking part include Michael Longley, Paul Muldoon, Ciaran Carson and  Medbh McGuckian.

Currently in rehearsals for the premiere of her award-winning play Leaves and working on her second novel, Lucy Caldwell is taking time out to visit Washington along with Glenn Patterson for a series of readings on May 16-17 in venues across the city.

Back in October 2006, Lucy Caldwell took another step into the literary elite as she was short listed, along with fellow NI novelist Nick Laird, for the prestigious Dylan Thomas prize.

 LISTEN to an interview with Lucy Cardwell or simply Read On for further information

Novelist, screenwriter, presenter, writer-in-residence and lecturer, Glenn Patterson’s literary career has already encompassed a great deal. Patterson’s novels explore new ways of understanding the history of the Troubles – a subtle mixture of traditional and postmodern, informed by a deep historical sensitivity.

Patterson was born in Belfast in 1961, attended Methodist College and honed his writing skills under Malcolm Bradbury’s tutelage on the Creative Writing MA course at the University of East Anglia. He returned to Northern Ireland in 1988 and published his first novel, Burning Your Own, in the same year.

 LISTEN to Glenn Patterson or simply Read on for further information

Commentators have, rather unkindly, quipped that you can’t turn around in Belfast for fear of stepping on a poet. Indeed, if you make your way down to Writers’ Square in the Cathedral Quarter you’d be hard pressed not to step on their poetry.

From CS Lewis to Louis MacNeice, Sam Thompson to John Hewitt, many of Belfast’s older poets are inscribed into the actual fabric of the city. Northern Ireland has spawned several generations worth of powerful poets, who are recognised on a world-stage as well as being vaunted on a local level.

Read on and watch videos of Ciaran Carson and Sinead Morrissey reading at the Belfast Rhythms poetry event.

Having spent more than a third of her life in Scotland, Belfast poet Kirsten Kearney has been grouped with the New Scottish poets. In her time there,Kearney published, was awarded prizes and made a name for herself in that country.

Now she has been chosen to represent her home country of Northern Ireland as part of the EU-wide poetry initiative European Poetry in Motion, set up to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Rome.
Read on