#36 Making Music With Birds And Bugs
City of Books
“Birds sing because they have to – because they must,” says the man who knows more than most about the subject, Professor David Rothenberg, an American musician, philosopher and writer whose books include Why Birds Sing, Nightingales in Berlin and Bug Music. “Birdsong is the real classic music, this is oldest music we know. It’s been around so much longer than the human species – it’s stood the test of time,” he says. “It’s in their very nature to need to sing, just like humans need to make music – we just have to do it. It’s part of the very essence of being a...
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#35 Learwife - Hatching and Hoping
City of Books
“I had to create her out of nothing,” says JR Thorp of her debut novel Learwife, which explores the untold story of King Lear’s wife.
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#34 Carlo Gébler on the Power of Greek Myths
City of Books
Famously, King Oedipus killed his father and married his mother. That's what everyone knows about the Greek myth. But Carlo Gébler sets out to humanise the story.
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#33 BIG TOP, BIG DREAMS - SARAH WEBB
City of Books
A chance meeting with a circus professor fired Sarah Webb’s imagination and led to her latest novel.
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#32 Myth-Making Michael Collins
City of Books
Michael Collins is the the Irish Civil War's most famous casualty but there is a lot of “what-if-ery”about him, says Ireland’s best-known historian Diarmaid Ferriter.
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#31 The Road Less Travelled
City of Books
Playwright Rosaleen McDonagh talks about her activism, disability campaigning, journey through adult education which led to a Phd, and weaving together Traveller and settled culture, forging an identity from them.
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#30 Paul Perry's Eden Gone Wrong
City of Books
A delicate, rare bloom which is “like the blood diamonds of the flower world” and fetches millions of euro is the subject of poet Paul Perry’s first solo novel.
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#29 In Praise of Difficult Women
City of Books
Violet Gibson, an Irishwoman who attempted to shoot Mussolini, is a character in Evelyn Conlon’s short story collection, Moving About The Place.
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#28 Lisa McInerney's Riotous Revelations
City of Books
From social change to gender change - all bases are covered in this wide-ranging conversation with one of Ireland's most sparkling writers.
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#27 Look! It's A Woman Writer!
City of Books
A new collection of essays which reflect on the perils and compulsions of authorship, the vagaries of success and failure - and what counts as either.
info_outlineWriter Eoin McNamee blurs fact and fiction to produce art, whether exploring the activities of secret intelligence agencies or speculating on why Princess Diana died in a high speed car accident.
His 17 novels are gritty and poetic – beautifully written noir – and have earned him a Booker nomination. But they sometimes attract criticism for being near the knuckle, although he sees that as their function, he tells podcast host Martina Devlin.
He also writes episodes for Valhalla, the Vikings spinoff for Netflix.
His most recent novel, The Vogue, is set in Northern Ireland where a corpse is dug up, and other secrets uncovered along with it. “Writing should be transgressive," he says.
The Vogue is published by Faber. More info here:
City of Books is funded by the Arts Council and supported by Dublin UNESCO City of Literature and the Museum of Literature Ireland