Category Archives: Events

“Culture in a Time of War” event at the RIA

Dublin Book Festival

Report by Natalya Kornienko for Chytomo.

This event was sponsored by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature in association with Dublin City Council. It was dedicated to the memory of Victoria Amelina, who was scheduled to appear on the panel before she was killed, along with 12 other people, by a Russian Missile strike on a pizza restaurant in Kramatorsk, Ukraine (27th June, 2023)

Human Rights Under Threat: The Arts Respond

October 14, 1:00 pm – 2:30 pm IST

Venue: Pearse Street Library Conference Centre

Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann is delighted to host this event in partnership with Smashing Times, International Centre for the Arts and Equality for the annual Dublin International Arts and Human Rights festival. The event is supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, in association with Dublin City Council.

George Szirtes, award-winning Hungarian writer primarily in the field of poetry, translation and memoir, will be interviewed by Mary Moynihan, writer, director, theatre and filmmaker and Artistic Director of Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality. He will discuss migration, human rights and freedom of expression, and the role of poetry in these challenging times. He will also give a short reading from his work. Csilla Toldy, also Hungarian and also an award winning poet, novelist, translator and film-maker will join the discussion and read from her work.

Tickets are for free but booking is essential here.

Speaker Biographies:

George Szirtes was born in Hungary and emigrated to England with his parents — her mother a survivor of concentration and labor camps—after the 1956 Budapest uprising.

Szirtes studied painting at Harrow School of Art and Leeds College of Art and Design. At Leeds he studied with Martin Bell, who encouraged Szirtes as he began to develop his poetic themes: an engaging mix of British individualism and European fluency in myth, fairy tale, and legend. Szirtes’s attention to shape and sound, cultivated through his background in visual art and his bilingual upbringing, quickly led to his successful embrace of formal verse. In an essay in Poetry magazine defending form, Szirtes argues that “rhyme can be unexpected salvation, the paper nurse that somehow, against all the odds, helps us stick the world together while all the time drawing attention to its own fabricated nature.”

His first book, The Slant Door (1979), won the Faber Memorial Prize. Bridge Passages (1991) was shortlisted for the Whitbread Poetry Prize. Reel (2004) won the T.S. Eliot Prize, and his New and Collected Poems was published by Bloodaxe in 2008.

Szirtes did not return to Hungary until 1984, when he visited on the first of several Arts Council travelling scholarships. He has since translated, edited, and anthologized numerous collections of Hungarian poetry. For his translation work Szirtes has won several awards, including the Déry Prize for Imre Madach’s The Tragedy of Man (1989) and the European Poetry Translation Prize for Zsuzsa Rakovsky’s New Life (1994). His own work has been translated into numerous languages and widely anthologised, including in Penguin’s British Poetry Since 1945.

He is the author of Exercise of Power (2001), a critical study of the artist Ana Maria Pacheco. He co-edited, with Penelope Lively, New Writing 10 (2001). Szirtes has written extensively for radio and is the author of more than a dozen plays, musicals, opera libretti, and oratorios.

Szirtes lives in England with his wife, the painter Clarissa Upchurch, with whom he ran the Starwheel Press. They collaborated on Budapest: Image, Poem, Film (2006). He is a member of the Advisory Panel of the British Center for Literary Translation, and is on the Advisory Board of the Poetry Book Society. He has been a member of the Royal Society of Literature since 1982.  www.georgeszirtes.blogspot.com


Csilla Toldy is a writer and translator from Hungary, living in Rostrevor, Co Down. Her publications include various literary magazines in the UK and Ireland, as well as three poetry pamphlets: Red Roots – Orange Sky (2013), The Emigrant Womans Tale (2015) and Vertical Montage (2018, Lapwing), and the short story collection, Angel Fur and other stories (Stupor Mundi, 2019). Her novel Bed Table Door, long listed for the Bath Novel award, and winner of the Desmond Elliot Residency explores the idea of political and personal freedom against the backdrop of the Cold War and Thatcher’s England. (Wrecking Ball Press, 2023). Csilla creates film poems as a visual artist. Her award-winning work has been screened at international festivals. In 2020 she was commissioned by the Executive Office of Northern Ireland to create a public artwork, a film poem for Holocaust Memorial Day. Csilla is a Creative Writing tutor with the Open University and a mentor with the Irish Writer’s Centre.

Her film scripts won the Katapult Prize and the Special Prize of the Motion Pictures Association of America as the Hungarian entry to the Hartley-Merrill Prize and they were placed as Drama (Foreign Film) Genre Finalist in the APMFF Screenplay Competition 2015 in New Jersey. The Bloom Mystery her documentary based on Joyce’s Ulysses was screened internationally. Her narrative non-fiction was short listed for the Kingston University Biography Prize and the Fish Memoir Prize. Csilla’s first novel, Bed Table Door  was long listed for the Bath Novel Award and is recently with The Wrecking Ball Press.

In 2023 she was the recipient of the Desmond Elliot Residency awarded by the National Centre for Writing.

 www.csillatoldy.co.uk

Mary Moynihan, Writer, Director, Theatre and Film-Maker and Artistic Director, Smashing Times International Centre for the Arts and Equality

Mary Moynihan, (she/her), MA, is an award-winning writer, director, theatre and film-maker, an interdisciplinary artist and one of Ireland’s most innovative arts and human rights artists creating work to promote the arts, human rights, climate justice, gender equality, diversity and peace. 

‘Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: Stories and Poems from Ukraine’: Reading and discussion with Victoria Amelina (Ukraine).

Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann, supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature, presents the Ukrainian writer and Human Rights activist, Victoria Amelina. Victoria has accepted our invitation to present two literary events in Dublin in October 2022, as part of the Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival. Victoria Amelina occasionally writes in English and her powerful essay on genocide and cultural memory, “Nothing Bad Has Ever Happened: a Tale of Two Genocides” was republished in the Irish Times earlier this year. “Homo Oblivious” was republished in the Dublin Review of Books in July.

On Thursday 20th October at 19:00, at the Smock Alley Theatre, Ms. Amelina, who is based in Kyiv, will discuss the role of artists and writers who chose to remain in Ukraine after the full-scale Russian invasion of February 24th of this year. She will also focus on the importance of preserving Ukrainian literature and culture, and will read from her own work. Her new project is entitled War and Justice Diary: Looking at Women Looking at War.

Booking via the Smock Alley Theatre website: https://smockalley.ticketsolve.com/ticketbooth/shows/873629957

Victoria Amelina also writes for children. Her second  Dublin Arts and Human Rights Festival event is for Ukrainian children aged 4-10 and is held (in Ukrainian) in Pearse Street Library on the 22nd October at 14:00.

During this event, she tells stories from a writer’s life and teaches the children to draw characters from her latest book, Ten Ways for an Excavator to Save the World (Ееесторії екскаватора Еки).

Booking via Pearse Street Library Link to DAHRF programme: https://smashingtimes.ie/festivals/dublin-arts-and-human-rights-festival-2022/

PEN Friends letter-writing event

Here is a quote from Enoh Meyomesse (Cameroon) about the effect of receiving letters from PEN members while he was in prison:

“Your letters set me free. Your postcards broke my chains.”

On 15th November, to mark the Day of the Imprisoned Writer (and the first anniversary of the re-launch of Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann), sixteen members joined us via Zoom to talk about selected writers and write letters and cards of support. Our featured writers were: Nedim Turfent (Turkey), Ilhan Sami Çomak (Turkey), Dawit Isaak (Eritrea), Amanuel Asrat (Eritea), Nasrin Sotoudeh (Iran), Pham Doan Trang (Vietnam) and Paola Ugaz (Peru).

This was a wonderfully friendly, engaged session where we thought about and talked about PEN’s principles of supporting writers who have been imprisoned because of their work, their ideas, their courage and their belief in freedom of expression.

With thanks to English PEN, PEN Norway and the Free the Poet Campaign and PEN International for their support.

Poetry Jukebox Curation “The Revolution is in the Heart”

 

“The Revolution is in the Heart”

We are delighted that our @poetryjukebox Curation “The Revolution is in the Heart” has gone live on https://soundcloud.com/user-815416158/sets/irishpen-imprisonedwriters

MEMBERS’ SUMMER SOLSTICE PARTY

The Board of Irish PEN/PEN na hÉireann is delighted to invite all members to a Summer Solstice Zoom party on Monday, 21st June at 7 pm. This is a chance to get to know each other and to celebrate brighter days, even though we can’t yet meet in person.

Everyone is invited to read a very short piece on the theme of Summer (2-3 minutes max.) You are also encouraged to use the chat function to get sociable. Under Covid circumstances, this has to be a BYOB (bring your own bottle) event.

Invitations have gone out by email. If you are interested in coming please REPLY by 18th June so that we can send you a link for the party. Please also state if you will read. We will draw up a programme which will go out with the Zoom link.

We very much hope that you will join us for this light-hearted session. Looking forward to meeting as many of you as possible. Thank you for your support to date.

President Higgins Receives Representatives of WORD and Irish Pen

President Higgins is the Patron of the Irish Writers Centre and he has put the promotion of creativity, critical thought and the careful use of language at the heart of his Presidency.

Meeting members of Irish PEN, Word and the Irish Writers Centre at Áras an Uachtaráin on 27th March 2018, President Higgins marked the launch of WORD and Irish PEN’s initiative to support International PENs Freedom to Write Campaign.

Freedom of expression and solidarity among writers are at the heart of PEN. PEN started in the aftermath of World War One bringing writers together to express solidarity within and between recently warring nations. PEN quickly expressed this same solidarity by campaigning for freedom of expression for all writers and for individual writers who were silenced, harassed, imprisoned and murdered because they had the courage to write.

As a group we are planning to take one action for each season during the coming year. These will be linked to other events such as the Nollaig na MBan in January, the PEN Dinner Empty Chair, the Day of the Imprisoned Writer in November and PEN International global actions. We will follow up with actions and updates on cases, but for this quarter we are focussing on, in particular Zehra Dogan and Raif Badawi.

Pictured, Father Tony Gaughan, President Irish PEN, Liz McManus, President Higgins, June Considine and Valerie Bistany (Irish Writers Centre)

PEN WORD iwc aras

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Listen to the President’s full speech here:

http://www.president.ie/en/diary/details/president-receives-representatives-of-word-and-irish-pen

 

Anne Enright Receives Irish PEN Award 2017

In the warm and welcoming surroundings of the Royal St George Yacht Club, on February 22nd  2018, Anne Enright received the Irish PEN Award 2017, delayed slightly from 2016 due to her work commitments at Laureate. Irish PEN were delighted to welcome Sheila Bailey of PEN International and particularly pleased to be joined by so many friends from WORD, with whom we are working on an initiative to support PEN International’s Freedom to Write Campaign.

In keeping with the tradition started in 1935, (when the WB Yeats dinner took place), the annual Irish PEN Award is presented in the company of other leading writers.  Members of Irish PEN, as well as previous winners, nominate and vote for the candidate. Since 1999, the award recipients have included John B Keane, Brian Friel, Edna O’Brien, William Trevor, John McGahern, Neil Jordan, Seamus Heaney, Jennifer Johnston, Maeve Binchy, Thomas Kilroy, Roddy Doyle, Joseph O’Connor, John Banville, Frank McGuiness and Eilis Ni Dhuibhne.

After Irish PEN chair Vanessa Fox O’Loughlin gave a short speech outlining the background to the award, June Considine from WORD, gave a superb summary of work to date and how Irish writers were supporting International PEN’s initiatives.

The beautiful silver trophy was made by Eileen Moylan in Kerry, photo by Ger Holland Photography.

Anne Enright Irish PEN Trophy