Centre for Irish Studies and Irish Literary Society Public Lecture

The Centre for Irish Studies (CIS) at St Mary’s University, Twickenham, will be co-hosting its annual joint public lecture on Thursday 27th November in conjunction with The Irish Literary Society. The event which is being held at the Bloomsbury Hotel, London, will see Dr Keith Hopper, Research Fellow for the CIS deliver a free public lecture, “The Passionate Transitory”: Dermot Healy and the Sense of Place’, During the talk, Dr Hopper will present an overview of Author Dermot Healy’s work, exploring the importance of time, memory and place in his electric oeuvre. About the lecture Dr Hopper said, “Until his untimely death in June 2014, Dermot Healy was frequently regarded as ‘Ireland’s greatest living writer’. In a documentary devoted to Healy’s work in 2011, the late Seamus Heaney hailed him as the poetic heir to Patrick Kavanagh: ‘Kavanagh was the poet of, as he said, “the passionate transitory”, bits and pieces of the everyday snatched out of time. He was the poet of praise for those things. It isn’t just nature poetry, it’s gratitude for the whole gift of existence in Healy’. Outside of Ireland, Healy is probably better known as a novelist, but he was also a playwright, screenwriter, actor, editor, and all-round literary enabler.” Dr Hopper teaches Literature and Film Studies for Oxford University’s Department for Continuing Education, and is a Research Fellow in the Centre for Irish Studies at St Mary’s University, Twickenham. He is the author of Flann O’Brien: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Post-modernist (revised edition 2009), general editor of the twelve-volume Ireland into Film series (2001–2007), and co-editor of The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (2013). He is a regular contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, and is currently completing a book on the writer and filmmaker Neil Jordan. Forthcoming publications include co-editing a series of four books by and about the late Dermot Healy (Dalkey Archive Press, 2015). The lecture is being held on Thursday 27th November from 7.30pm. Invitations for the event are available from the Irish Literary Society at irishlitsoc@gmail.com. For more information on the lecture contact Michelle Paull at michelle.paull@stmarys.ac.uk.