Dave Lordan, Fiona Sampson & Jaan Kaplinski
Saturday 26th March at 6.30pm €14/10/8
Dave Lordan
Dave Lordan was born in Derby, England, in 1975, and grew
up in West Cork. He won the 2005 Patrick Kavanagh Award for Poetry and, for his first collection The Boy in the Ring (Salmon Poetry, 2007), he won the 2008 Rupert and Eithne Strong Award for Best First Collection and was shortlisted for the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. His second collection, Invitation to a Sacrifice, was published by Salmon in 2010. Eigse Riada Theatre Company produced his first play, Jo Bangles, at the Mill Theatre, Dundrum in 2010. He has lived in Holland, Greece and Italy, and now resides in Co. Wicklow.
"Lordan is the poetic voice that Ireland needs and he arrives exactly upon his hour"
Fiona Sampson
Fiona Sampson
Born in London in 1963, Fiona Sampson has published fifteen
books - including poetry, philosophy of language and studies
of writing process - of which the most recent are Rough Music
(Carcanet, 2010) and Common Prayer (Carcanet 2007), both
shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. She was
educated at the Universities of Oxford and Nijmegen and
has a PhD in the philosophy of language. Her many books
in translation include Patuvachki Dnevnik/Travel Diary, which
won the Macedonian Zlaten Prsten, and she has translated
the Estonian poet Jaan Kaplinski. Other awards include the
Newdigate Prize and the Charles Angoff and Cholmondeley
Awards. For her pioneering residencies in health care, Sampsonhas received international recognition. She has been the editorof Poetry Review since 2005 and contributes regularly to theTLS, The Guardian, The Irish Times and other periodicals.
Her Newcastle Lectures, Music Lessons, will be published by Bloodaxe in May.
“working with fresh-peeled vividness to get at the quick of
experience as it happens.”
Sean O’Brien
Jaan Kaplinski
Jaan Kaplinski was born in Tartu in 1941, shortly after the
Soviet occupation of Estonia. He has worked as a researcher inlinguistics, a sociologist, ecologist, lecturer and translator. He has published several books of poetry and essays in Estonian, Finnish and English, including The Same Sea in Us All (Harvill, 1990), The Wandering Border (Harvill, 1992) and Through the Forest (Harvill, 1996). His latest book of poems published in English is Evening Brings Everything Back (Bloodaxe Books, 2004), translated by the author with Fiona Sampson. Kaplinski was a member of the new post-Revolution Estonian parliament from 1992-95 and has published many essays on cultural transition and globalisation. In 1996, he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature by Czeslaw Milosz.
”He is re-thinking Europe, revisioning history, in these
poems of our times. Elegant, musing, relentless, inward,
fresh. Poems of gentle politics and love that sometimes
scare you"
Gary Snyder