#19 Anne Enright on an Altered Ireland
City of Books
“I don’t know if Ireland is the same any more,” says Booker Prize winner and former Laureate for Irish Fiction Anne Enright.
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#18 More Than One String To His Mandolin
City of Books
Louis de Bernières is known worldwide as the author of Captain Corelli's Mandolin - but at nineteen, teaching in Colombia, he was known for something else. Dancing like a chicken.
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#17 Haunted By The Ghost
City of Books
In her first podcast interview since winning the An Post Irish Book of the Year award for 2020, Doireann Ní Ghríofa describes how she shares her life with a famous 18th century widow.
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#16 The Truth About Secrets and Lies
City of Books
Eoin McNamee blurs fact and fiction to produce art, whether exploring secret intelligence agencies or speculating on why Princess Diana died in a high speed car accident.
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#15 How My Film Won an Oscar – Emma Donoghue
City of Books
Writer Emma Donoghue us how she wrote an Oscar-nominated script working with director Lenny Abrahamson on 'Room'.
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#14 The Diplomatic Arts
City of Books
Ireland's man in Washington, Ambassador Daniel Mulhall, talks us through the rhyme and reason of poetry - and how literature can act as a cultural bridge. He practises what he preaches by tweeting daily poems.
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#13 Lemn Sissay and the Story of Why
City of Books
Lemn Sissay shoots from the hip and speaks from the heart in this interview about mother and baby homes, the Black Lives Matter campaign and his experience in the British care system.
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#12 Richard Ford on Flouncing and Failure
City of Books
Richard Ford is listing his failures. He wanted to be a lawyer in the US Marines. Didn’t work out. He wanted to be “a lawyer, period”. Didn’t work out.
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#11 Liz Nugent's Dark Materials
City of Books
Doyenne of domestic noir Liz Nugent’s work has an army of fans including Graham Norton, who describes her latest hit Our Little Cruelties as part rollercoaster, part maze.
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#10 Colum McCann on Motorbikes, Motivation and Middle East
City of Books
Writer Colum McCann talks about his hope that his book, Apeirogon, may contribute to peace. It fictionalises the true story of two fathers, an Israeli and a Palestinian, who each lose a child in the conflict.
info_outlineIn her first podcast interview since winning the An Post Irish Book of the Year award for 2020, Doireann Ní Ghríofa describes how she shares her life with a famous 18th century widow – Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill.
When she began the literary detective work that resulted in A Ghost in the Throat, Doireann began to feel a strong sense of Eibhlín Dubh’s presence.
Her book is an original and compelling work which pays tribute to a passionate love affair that ended in tragedy. It traces the life of Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, an Irish noblewoman and poet – composer of Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire or The Lament For Art O’Leary, which she recited over her husband’s dead body.
Composed in Irish and translated later into English, it outlines how she eloped with a dashing cavalryman, murdered in 1773 by a tyrannical landowner.
Doireann tells the City of Books podcast that she was quite a lonesome child and young mother but since becoming immersed in the story “I haven’t felt so lonesome – I have the sense that she’s with me”.
More information: https://tramppress.com/product/a-ghost-in-the-throat-by-doireann-ni-ghriofa/