Friday, May 17th, 2013, 6.30pm, FREE
Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop,
Middle Street,
Galway
Readings by Fiona Smith and Kevin Doyle
plus the launch of Jean Folan’s debut poetry collection
Between Time
plus The Galway Launches of The Light Knows Tricks by Jo Hemmant
& The First Book Of Frags by Dave
Lordan
Fiona Smith is a freelance journalist and
translator. She has published a wide range of journalistic work in both Irish
and international publications. She currently writes on Irish topics for the
German Press Agency dpa and translates from Scandinavian languages into
English. She has published poetry in Southword and in the Hennessy New Irish
Writing page in the Irish Independent. She won the poetry section of the Over
the Edge New Writer of the Year competition in 2012 with the poem 'At
Letterfrack'. She is currently working on a first collection.
Kevin Doyle is from Cork. His short
stories have been published in Cork Literary Review, Stinging Fly, Southwords, Burning
Bush, Cúirt Journal, Duality, Liblit and Sunday Tribune. His work
has also been included in anthologies such as Irish Writers Against War
(Dublin, 2003), Pulse Fiction (London, 1998) and Snapshots (London, 1999) as
well as Cork millennium collection, An Gob Saor. He has been shortlisted
for many prizes (including Over The Edge, 2010) and has won top placings in the
Ian St James Short Story Award, Kilkenny Prize, Tipperary Short Story Weekend
Prize and the Highlands and Islands Short Story Award. His work was
described by the late Patrick Galvin as ‘terse and original’. He blogs
regularly at on Irish and radical politics from an anarchist perspective (http://kfdoyle.wordpress.com).
Jean Folan was born in Galway in 1951. She
lives in Inishcrone, Co Sligo and is enrolled on the MA in Writing in NUI
Galway. Between Time is her first collection of poems and is published by
Lapwing. Jean Folan was shortlisted for the Cúirt New Writing Prize 2007, and
the Over the Edge Showcase 2008, and was a featured reader at Over the Edge 2007.
She was the winner of the Impromptu Haiku, Culture Night 2010, Ballina Arts
Centre, Co. Mayo and runner-up at Culture Night 2012, Kenny’s Bookshop, Galway.
Jo Hemmant was born in Manchester in 1967,
and this was to be the first of many places she has lived, including Sicily,
Holland and Hong Kong. She has always worked with words—after brief stints
teaching English as a foreign language and writing PR puffs, she moved into
journalism and editing. This experience in publishing prompted her to set up
Pindrop, a boutique poetry press, in 2010, which has published twelve titles to
date. She now lives in the Kent countryside with her husband and two sons and
is involved in local poetry, acting as Secretary of The Kent and Sussex Poetry
Society and running creative writing workshops. Her poems have been published
in various magazines and anthologies, such as Magma, Iota, Dream Catcher,
Jericho (Cinnamon Press, 2012) and nothing left to burn (Ragged Raven Press,
2011) and she has won prizes in several competitions, including first prize in The
New Writer Poetry and Prose Competition 2011(collection category), second prize
in the Torriano Poetry Competition in 2011 and runner-up in the Cardiff
International Poetry Competition 2012. Her poetry collection, The Light Knows
Tricks, is just published by Doire Press.
Dave Lordan is the first writer to win
Ireland’s three national prizes for young poets. He is the current holder of
the Ireland Chair of Poetry Bursary Award and previous winner of both the
Patrick Kavanagh and Strong Awards for poetry. He has won wide acclaim for his
writing and is a renowned performer of his own work, with the Irish Times
calling him ‘as brilliant on the page as he is in performance’. He has read his
work by invitation at festivals and venues across Europe and North America. His
collections are The Boy in The Ring (2007) & Invitation to a Sacrifice
(2010), both published by Salmon Poetry. His poems are regularly broadcast on
Irish national radio and he reviews for the flagship Arts show Arena, as
well as many publications including Ireland’s leading literary
magazine, The Stinging Fly, of which he was a guest editor for summer
2012. He teaches contemporary critical theory and poetic practice on the
MA in poetry studies in Dublin City University and he teaches creative writing
at primary, secondary, third, and adult education levels. Dave’s debut
collection of short stories First Books of Frags is just published by Wurm
Press.
