The Embassy of Ireland in Germany presents
Brigidsfest
The Authors are Present
a festival of female creativity in written and spoken word with discussions, readings, and workshops
About
Presented by the Embassy of Ireland in Germany, in partnership with Literature Ireland, Exberliner Magazine, and The Curious Fox Bookshop, 'Brigidsfest - The Authors are Present' is a festival of female creativity, with a focus on the written and spoken word - Featuring: Audrey Magee, Elaine Feeney, Hilary Fannin, Louise Nealon, Olivia Fitzsimmons, Roisin Kiberd, and Wendy Erskine.
Following the success and popularity of previous in-person literary events at the Embassy to celebrate St. Brigid's Day, o ering an opportunity to hear and learn from great Irish talents, 'Brigidsfest- The Authors are Present' expands upon the 2022 iteration 'Brigidsfest - Hot o the Press' which gave an introduction to new not-yet-translated works from these seven great authors.
The festival will consist of a three-day programme with the writers at the Embassy in Berlin, where they will delve deeper into their work and approach with panel discussions and workshops.
For more information and to register go to:
https://www.dfa.ie/irish-embassy/germany/news-and-events/
Programme
1st February
10:30 - Non-Fiction writing workshop with Roisin Kiberd
16:00 - Short story workshop with Wendy Erskine
18:00 - Panel discussionWriting the universal, writing the Local
Hosted by Jennifer Collins with Audrey Magee, Louise Nealon, Roisin Kiberd, Wendy Erskine
2nd February
16:00 - Flash Fiction workshop with Oliva Fitzsimmons
18:00 - Panel Discussion
Ownership of the Narrative - Who gets the POV?
Hosted by Kate Ferguson with Elaine Feeney, Hilary Fannin, Olivia Fitzsimmons
3rd February
15:00 - Memoir writing workshop with Hilary Fannin
17:30 - Poetry writing workshop with Elaine Feeney
Access to workshops and events are free through registration
We regret to inform you that due to unforseen circumstances Audrey will not be able to travel for Brigidsfest 2023. We hope to welcome her to the Embassy again in the near future
Audrey Magee
Audrey Magee was born in Ireland and lives in Wicklow.
Her latest novel, The Colony, was longlister for the 2022 Booker prize. Her rst novel, The Undertaking, was short-listed for the Women’s Prize for Fiction, for France’s Festival du Premier Roman and for the Irish Book Awards. It was also nominated for the Dublin Literary Award and the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction.
He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea.
Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without engine – the authentic experience.
Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place - one in his paintings, the other with his faithful rendition of its speech, the language he hopes to preserve.
But the people who live here on this rock – three miles long and half-a-mile wide – have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Over the summer each of the women and men in the household this French and Englishman join is forced to question what they value and what they desire. At the end of the summer, as the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.
The Colony
Elaine Feeney
Elaine Feeney is a writer from the west of Ireland. Feeney has published three poetry collections including The Radio was Gospel & Rise (Salmon Poetry). Her debut novel As You Were(Vintage) won the 2021 Dalkey Book Festival’s Emerging Writer Prize, The Kate O’ Brien Prize, The Society of Authors’ McKitterick Prize (UK) and was shortlisted for Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards and for the prestigious Rathbones-Folio Prize. Feeney’s work featured on Best of 2020 lists and was chosen by The Observer as a top debut novelist for 2020. Feeney wrote the multi award-winning drama, WRoNGHEADED commissioned by the Liz Roche Company and her work was published in the Art of The Glimpse: 100 Irish Short Stories. She lectures at The National University of Ireland, Galway, where she is also a founding member of the Tuam Oral History Project. Feeney was a judge of the Seamus Heaney Poetry Prize 2021.
How to Build a Boat
One of those rare books that leaves you feeling less lonely. An uplifting tale of community, healing and the small connections that can change a life. A gorgeous gift of a novel, hopeful and full of humanity.
Jamie O'Neill loves the colour red. He also loves tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. At age 13 there are two things he especially wants in life: to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he nds two people who might just be able to help him.
How to Build a Boat is the story of how one boy and his mission transforms the lives of his teachers, Tess and Tadhg, and brings together a community. Written with tenderness and verve, it's about love, family and connection, the power of imagination, and how our greatest adventures never happen alone.
Hilary Fannin
Hilary is an award-winning playwright, novelist and newspaper columnist. She was writer in association at the Abbey Theatre in its centenary year, 2004, and her plays have been performed in Ireland, London, Europe and North America. For the past decade she has been writing a weekly column for The Irish Times and was named Irish Broadsheet Columnist of the Year in 2019. Her memoir, Hopscotch, was published to critical acclaim in 2015. Her rst novel, The Weight of Love, was published in 2020 and won the John McGahern Award for debut Irish ction.
The Weight of Love
'This is heartache for grown ups. The Weight of Love pulls you in and does not let go.'
London, 1996. Robin and Ruth meet in the sta room of an East London school. Robin, desperate for a real connection, instantly falls in love. Ruth, recently bereaved and fragile, is tentative.
When Robin introduces Ruth to his childhood friend, Joseph, a tortured and talented artist, their attraction is instant. Powerless, Robin watches on as the girl he loves and his best friend begin a passionate and turbulent a air. Dublin 2017. Robin and Ruth are married and have a son, Sid, who is about to emigrate to Berlin. Theirs is a marriage haunted by the ghost of Joseph and as the distance between them grows, Robin makes a choice that could have potentially devastating consequences.
The Weight of Love is a beautiful exploration of how we manage life when the notes and beats of our existence, so carefully arranged, begin to slip o the stave. An intimate and moving account of the intricacies of marriage and the myriad ways in which we can love and be loved.
-Anne EnrightLouise Nealon
Louise Nealon is a writer from Co. Kildare who studied English literature in Trinity College Dublin, and then completed a Masters in Creative Writing at Queen’s University Belfast in 2016.
In 2017, she won the Seán Ó’Faoláin International Short Story Competition. She also received the Francis Ledwidge Creative Writing Award. In May 2020 Manilla Press, (Bonnier Books UK) pre-empted Louise’s debut novel ‘Snow ake’, in a two book deal for a substantial six gure sum. It sold in auction in the US to Emily Gri n at HarperCollins. Element Pictures have acquired TV/Film rights. It is in development with the BBC. Foreign rights to Germany, Italy, Russia, Poland and Slovkia
Published in May 2021 to critical and commercial acclaim, Snow ake featured on BBC Radio 4’s Book at Bedtime this week, read by Louisa Harland of Derry Girls fame Louise has also written a short story for BBC Radio 4 - short worlds, broadcast in early 2021.
Published by Harper Collins in the US in September 2021 People Magazine selected Snow ake as a People’s Pick in their October 4th issue. Snow ake was also an Amazon US spotlight Pick For The Month Of September As Featured Debut, selected among Bustle’s Most Anticipated Books of the Month and picked as one of Shondaland 5 Best Books for September. Snow ake was also chosen by The Nervous Book Club (TNB) as their September book.
Snow ake
Eighteen-year-old Debbie was raised on her family’s rural dairy farm, forty minutes and a world away from Dublin. She lives with her mother, Maeve, a skittish woman who takes to her bed for days on end, claims not to know who Debbie’s father is, and believes her dreams are prophecies. Rounding out their small family is Maeve’s brother Billy, who lives in a caravan behind their house, drinks too much, and likes to impersonate famous dead writers online. Though they may have their quirks, the Whites’ erce love for one another is never in doubt.
But Debbie’s life is changing. Earning a place at Trinity College Dublin, she commutes to her classes a few days a week. Outside the sheltered bubble of her childhood for the rst time, Debbie nds herself both overwhelmed and disappointed by her fellow students and the pace and anonymity of city life. While the familiarity of the farm o ers comfort, Debbie still nds herself pulling away from it. Yet just as she begins to ponder the possibilities the future holds, a resurgence of strange dreams raises her fears that she may share Maeve’s fate. Then a tragic accident upends the family’s equilibrium, and Debbie discovers her next steps may no longer be hers to choose.
Gorgeous and beautifully wrought, Snow ake is an a ecting coming-of-age story about a young woman learning to navigate a world that constantly challenges her sense of self.
Olivia Fitzsimons is from County Down, Northern Ireland but now lives in Wicklow. She never lost her accent. She is the recipient of a Literary Bursary Award from The Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon and a Support for the Individual Artist grant from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and is currently one of twelve writers selected for the Irish Writers Centre Evolution Programme. She studied History at Trinity College Dublin with an Erasmus year at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Netherlands. She has an MA in Film and Theory from DIT and works as a screenwriter and in lm development. Her debut, The Quiet Whispers Never Stop, was published by John Murray in April 2022.
The Quiet Whispers Never Stop
In 1982, Nuala Malin struggles to stay connected, to her husband, to motherhood, to the smallness of her life in the belly of a place that is built on hate and stagnation. Her daughter Sam and baby son PJ keep her tethered to this life she doesn't want. She nds unexpected refuge with a seventeen-year-old boy, but this relationship is only temporary, a sticking plaster on a festering wound. It cannot last and when her chance to leave Northern Ireland comes, Nuala takes it.
In 1994, Sam Malin plans escape. She longs for a life outside her dysfunctional family, far away from the North and all its troubles, free from her quiet brooding father Patsy, who never talks about her mother, Nuala; a woman Sam barely knew, who abandoned them twelve years ago. She nds solace in music, drugs and her best friend Becca, but most of all in an illicit relationship with a jagged, magnetic older man.
She is drawn to him, and he to her, in a way she can't yet comprehend.
Sam is more like her mother than she knows.
Olivia Fitzsimons'Powerful''Darkly beautiful' 'Captivating'
Roisin Kiberd
Roisin Kiberd has worked in tech, reported on tech and spent long nights exploring the internet’s strangest subcultures for her column for Motherboard. Once the online voice of a cheese brand, she has written in her own voice for the Guardian and Vice, and her essays have been published in The New York Times, the Dublin Review, the White Review and the Stinging Fly.
The Disconnect
- by a writer of extraordinary style and intellectual range'
We all live online now, but what does that mean IRL? Our every move is watched, but how clearly can we see ourselves?
In these wide-ranging, thought-provoking and witty essays, Roisin Kiberd o ers immersive insight into the ways our world is changing to t the online fever-dream. Tracing the lines between Net ix and nap hotels, camgirls and capitalism, dating apps and a grand uni ed theory of Monster Energy Drinks, she holds the zeitgeist up for essential, nuanced scrutiny – and turns an equally frank eye on herself. She asks what we’ve gained, lost and given willingly away in exchange for this connected world.
'Unsettling, illuminating, and perversely fun
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Wendy Erskine
Wendy Erskine’s rst collection, Sweet Home, published by Stinging Fly/Picador was longlisted for the Gordon Burn Prize and the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award (‘Inakeen’). It was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize and the Edge Hill Prize, and it won the Butler Literary Award. It was optioned for television, and it was a book of the year in the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, The Observer and The White Review. Wendy Erskine lives in Belfast and is a full-time secondary school teacher. Her new collection, Dance Move, is published by Stinging Fly/Picador.
Dance Move
‘An exceptional ear for dialogue, an impeccable semantic rhythm and an uncanny ability to tease laughter out of the darkest moments mean Erskine is perfectly poised to stare, unflinching, into our neoliberal abyss. The result is a gripping, wonderfully understated book that oozes humanity, emotion and humour.’ Guardian -
Dance Move is a collection of eleven stories, described as ‘cosmic quotidian.’ Funny, dark and tender, they are tales of depth and humanity. Meet Sonya, who scours the streets of Belfast for the missing posters of her dead son. Meet Mrs Dallesandro in the tanning salon on her wedding anniversary, remembering a teenage sexual experience. Meet Drew Lord Haig, called upon to sing his obscure record at a paramilitary event. ‘This book,’ says Benjamin Myers, ‘cements [Erskine’s] status as simply one of the very best short story writers around.’