Heart, be at Peace and Naming Love, Saturday, 12th October at 8pm, Nenagh Arts Centre, Tickets €20
Award-winning writer Donal Ryan will be in conversation with writer and radio producer Paula Shields. The event will open with a reading by Geraldine Mitchell from her latest book Naming Love.
A stunning, lyrical novel told in twenty-one voices Donal Ryan’s Heart, Be at Peace is a stunning, standalone literary novel in its own right, and a sequel to Donal Ryan’s multi-award-winning bestseller, The Spinning Heart.
In a small town in rural Ireland, the local people have weathered the storms of economic collapse and are looking towards the future. The jobs are back, the dramas of the past seemingly lulled, and although the town bears the marks of its history, new stories are unfolding. But a fresh menace is creeping around the lakeshore and the lanes of the town, and the peace of the community is about to be shattered in an unimaginable way. Young people are being drawn towards the promise of fast money whilst the generation above them tries to push back the tide of an enemy no one can touch.
Donal Ryan’s work has been published in over twenty languages to major critical acclaim. The Spinning Heart won the Guardian First Book Award, the EU Prize for Literature (Ireland), and Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards; it was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and the Desmond Elliott Prize, and was voted ‘Irish Book of the Decade’. His fourth novel, From a Low and Quiet Sea, was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award 2018, and won the Jean Monnet Prize for European Literature. His novel, Strange Flowers, was voted Novel of the Year at the Irish Book Awards, and was a number one bestseller, as was his most recent novel The Queen of Dirt Island, which was also shortlisted for Book of the Year at the Irish Book Awards. Donal lectures in Creative Writing at the University of Limerick. He lives with his wife Anne Marie and their two children outside Limerick City.
Geraldine Mitchell is an Irish poet and writer. She is a former teacher and journalist who now lives in Mayo. She won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2008 and is widely published and anthologised. Naming Love is her 5th collection about which Jane Clarke has written ‘Naming Love is a collection of poetry that sings of love and mystery and the unknown as well as of solitude and loneliness and the quiet hours of reckoning. It’s a collection that loves the world through awestruck observation. It celebrates birds and weeds and the changing of the seasons. It laments loss of people and loss of nature. It tracks the changing of the seasons. It notices the little things in the everyday and makes them marvellous’.