“If poetry and the arts do anything, they can fortify your inner life, your inwardness.” Seamus Heaney

The London Irish Centre have teamed up with Counterparts: Explorations In Irish Culture to present
:Irish Poetry Reading: Bernard O’Donoghue, Sinéad Morrissey and Leontia Flynn.

Date: July 16^th , 2015
Doors: 19:00
Readings Begin: 20:00
Venue: London Irish Centre
Price: £8.00

Reading on the night are:

Bernard O’Donoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork in 1945, and he still lives there for part of the year. Since 1962 he has lived principally in England, and since 1965 in Oxford where he taught Medieval Literature and the History of the English Language at Magdalen and Wadham Colleges. He has published seven volumes of poetry, most recently Selected Poems (Faber 2008) and Farmers Cross (Faber 2011), and a verse translation of the medieval English poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Penguin Classics, 2006). Four of his books of poetry were shortlisted for the T.S.Eliot Prize: Gunpowder (Chatto1995, which won the Whitbread Poetry Prize); Here Nor There(Chatto 1999); Outliving (Chatto 2003); and Farmers Cross (Faber 2011). He is currently working on a volume on Poetry for the Oxford University Press ‘Very Short Introduction’ series, and his selections from Chaucer Reading Chaucer’s Poetry was published by Faber in May 2015. He is also working on a verse translation of Piers Plowman for Faber. And is is currently the President of the Irish Literary Society in London.

Sinéad Morrissey was born in 1972 and grew up in Belfast. She read English and German at Trinity College, Dublin, from which she took her PhD in 2003. Her five collections are There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2002), The State of the Prisons (2005), Through the Square Window (2009) and the T S Eliot Prize-winning Parallax (2013) all of which are published by Carcanet Press. She has lived in Germany, Japan and New Zealand and now lectures in creative writing at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, Queen’s University, Belfast. She is Belfast's inaugural Poet Laureate.

Leontia Flynn is the author of three collections of poetry, as well as a book about Northern Irish poet Medbh McGuckian. Her most recent collection, Profit and Loss was published by Jonathan Cape in 2011 and was shortlisted for the T.S Eliot Prize. She has been awarded the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, the Rooney Prize, the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Prize for Irish Literature and the AWB Vincent American Ireland Fund Literary Award for 2014. She is research fellow at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry, and lives in Belfast