John Burnside, Sylva Fischerová & John F. Deane
Sunday 28th March at 4.00pm €10/8
John Burnside
The poet and novelist John Burnside was born in Dunfermline, Scotland in 1955. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, most recently The Hunt in the Forest (Cape, 2009). Other collections include Gift Songs (Cape, 2007) and The Asylum Dance (Cape, 2000), which won the 2000 Whitbread Poetry Award and was shortlisted for both the Forward Prize and the T.S. Eliot Prize. Burnside’s most recent novels are The Devil’s Footprints (Cape, 2007), shortlisted for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and Glister (2008). He is the author of a memoir in two volumes, A Lie About My Father (Cape, 2006) and Waking Up in Toytown, published this year to widespread acclaim. He is Professor of Creative Writing at St. Andrews University and an occasional columnist for the Guardian. He lives in Fife.
“He is part magician and part
attentive observer... watching the
world’s sleight of hand, that shift and
change which is transmogrification
and perception.”
Aislinn Hunter
Sylva Fischerová
Sylva Fischerová was born in 1963 in Prague. She grew up in the Moravian town of Olomouc as a daughter of a non-Marxist philosopher whose works were banished under communist rule. She returned to Prague to study philosophy and physics, and later Greek and Latin, at Charles University where she now teaches ancient Greek literature and philosophy. She has published six volumes of poems in Czech, and her poetry has been translated and published in numerous languages. An earlier selection of her poems, The Tremor of Racehorses, translated by Ian and Jarmila Milner, was published by Bloodaxe in 1990. She recently began to write prose, Miracle, a book of her stories, as well as a book for children, appeared in 2005. The Swing in the Middle of Chaos: Selected Poems, co-translated with Stuart Friebert, was published by Bloodaxe in 2009.
“Driven by a restless moral
intelligence which never loses
urgency, Fischerová’s poems mix hope
with irony, showing why the world
makes us ache”
Dennis Schmitz
John F. Deane
John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He is the author of several collections of poetry, most recently A Little Book of Hours (Carcanet, 2008). His poetry has been published in several languages, and he has also translated poetry from languages including Romanian, Swedish, and French. For his poetry, he has won the O’Shaughnessy Award, the Martin Toonder Award, the Grand International Prize (Romania), and the Premio Internazionale di Poesia Città di Marineo (Italy). He founded Poetry Ireland and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1979. He also founded the Dedalus Press, and was editor there until 2004. In 2007 he was made a Chevalier of the Order of Arts by the French government, and in 2008 he was elected President of the European Academy of Poetry. He lives in Dublin.
“No other contemporary Irish poet,
and few Irish writers, have mastered
the art of eloquent, impassioned
expression as artistic statement as
beautifully.”
Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times