'I wanted to discover the world, not read about the interior of our house'

Thu, May 21, 2015

Eamon Morrissey, one of our best loved actors, comes to the Town Hall Theatre next week with his latest, much acclaimed, one-man show, Maeve’s House, inspired by the writings of the brilliant short story writer Maeve Brennan.

‘I’ve come to terms with poetry being my job’

Thu, May 07, 2015

The question “Where do you come from?” can be a funny one for poet Hollie McNish. As her name indicates her roots are firmly in Scotland, but her accent is clearly English, highlighting a geographical proximity to London.

Drums, clowns, refugees …and sacrilegious lesbians

Thu, Apr 30, 2015

Among the highlights of the Galway Theatre Festival is the trilogy of acclaimed one-man shows from percussionist and performer Brian Fleming; Gis a Shot of Your Bongos Mister, Have Yis No Homes to Go To, and A Sacrilegious Lesbian and Homosexual Parade.

‘I’m a novelist who briefly blogged, rather than a blogger turned novelist’

Thu, Apr 23, 2015

Galway writer Lisa McInerney has been hailed by The Irish Times as “the most talented writer at work today in Ireland”. For several years, as Sweary Lady, she penned the award-winning blog The Arse End of Ireland, about life on a Galway council estate.

‘As a writer you see something from the outside, but you also have the view from inside’

Thu, Apr 16, 2015

When award winning English novelist and short story writer Jon McGregor comes to Galway, to read at the Cúirt International Festival of Literature, it will be his second visit to the county in less than a month.

'I love bringing a story to life on the cinema screen’

Thu, Apr 09, 2015

Driving home to County Kerry, to help his father with some cattle farming, was not the time Gerard Barrett expected to receive a call from Hollywood A-lister Charlize Theron, asking him to script and direct a film she is producing.

‘Cré na Cille is a hymn to the Irish of Connemara’

Thu, Mar 26, 2015

Since its publication in 1949, Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s Cré na Cille has been hailed as a masterpiece. Yet the novel has, in the words of John Banville, “remained locked away from non-Irish speakers”.

‘My duty is to build bridges’

Wed, Mar 11, 2015

Rarely a week goes by when the strife in Israel/Palestine does not make headlines in the media. In recent years the conflict has seemed ever more intractable, the people increasingly polarised and entrenched. Yet in spite of all, there are still those on both sides of the divide working for mutual understanding and a peaceful resolution of the conflict.

‘I Belonged To Glasgow’

Thu, Mar 05, 2015

Some weeks ago Little John Nee captivated the Town Hall studio with his autobiographical show The Galway Years, and he returns to the venue next weekend with more engrossing memoirs in The Glasgow Years in which he will revisit his 1960s childhood.

‘There are many ways to connect - for me music is the one’

Thu, Feb 26, 2015

ANDRES MARTORELL is a man on the move. Sunday night found the singer in Carna, where he was taking part in a traditional singers circle. The following morning comes this interview. An hour later he is en route to Dublin to catch a flight to Denmark.

‘Life led me away from writing another novel until now’

Thu, Feb 19, 2015

Percy Bysse Shelley once famously declared that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world”. While he may have been boosting his own profession with the remark, history furnishes quite a few examples of authors who were actual legislators.

‘I’m proud to have Connemara blood in me’

Thu, Feb 12, 2015

FOR SOME 25 years, Gary Lydon has been among the most stalwart of Irish actors with a string of acclaimed performances on stage, television, and film. His credits include leading roles in Billy Roche’s Wexford Trilogy, TV series The Clinic - for which he won two IFTAs - and the films Calvary, Small Engine Repair, and Michael Collins.

‘I have no regrets and it’s not over yet’

Thu, Jan 29, 2015

MARY BLACK describes Galway as “a particular favourite place of mine”, but it is no idle platitude. It was here, and more specifically during her tenure with De Dannan, where she came of age as both singer and performer, setting her on the path to her now unassailable position as Ireland’s leading contemporary folk artist.

The Pub Landlord - twenty years of ‘behaving appallingly humbly’

Thu, Jan 22, 2015

IT WAS 20 years ago this year that Al Murray introduced the world to the Pub Landlord, his pompously loveable, slightly jingoistic, opinionated font of ‘common sense’, who espouses a ‘Thank God I’m an Englishman’ view of the world, and is hopelessly in love with being British!

‘I saved myself from being bullied with the plays I wrote’

Thu, Jan 15, 2015

GALWAY HAS been enriched with many artistic immigrants down the years and among their number is Swedish playwright and translator Ann Henning Jocelyn.

‘People should stay rather than emigrate, it’s too convenient for the Establishment for them to go away’

Thu, Dec 18, 2014

In these times of ongoing austerity, looming water charges, and general disaffection, God knows we could all do with a laugh. Let us raise our glasses therefore, in thanks and salutation, to writer Eamonn Kelly who delivers guffaws a-plenty in The Franz Kafka Centre for the Uninvolved, newly e-published and ready for download to a Kindle near you.

‘I wanted something like an Irish version of Dante’s Inferno’

Thu, Dec 11, 2014

Dark and audacious, Fisherman’s Blues, the rambunctious new novel from playwright, novelist, and screenwriter Mick Donnellan covers a myriad of genres from crime noir to comedy with an odd bit of religion for good measure.

‘Galway has something between a tolerance and an appetite for experiment’

Thu, Dec 04, 2014

December will be a hectic month for Tommy Tiernan as he undertakes a seven date tour across all corners of County Galway, performing his new show Out Of The Whirlwind. The show, he says, will be a mixture of “storytelling and improv”, but this is also likely to be the last run of ‘world tour of Galway’ styled shows Tommy will do.

‘I borrow from my surroundings, create fantasy landscapes from my head’

Thu, Nov 27, 2014

He grew up loving outdoor pursuits and the natural world, despite living close to the world’s largest car manufacturing plant. He has lived in Ireland most his life, but his interest in the country was stimulated in part through British Army radio.

‘Being an outsider gives me a different view on things other people might take for granted’

Thu, Nov 13, 2014

There is a horse farm about a mile and a half outside Motala, a small town located between Stockholm and Gothenburg in southern Sweden. There it is surrounded by vast woodlands, a huge lake, hunters cabins, and amid the rural isolation, an old mental asylum.

E-paper

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