Host Eleanor Wachtel speaks with a round-table of international poets about what inspires their imaginations, from the political to the personal. Among the panellists are the Canadian and international winners of the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize, poet and Griffin trustee Carolyn Forché, and poet/ broadcaster Theo Dorgan.
ELEANOR WACHTEL is a highly respected literary journalist and broadcaster, and host of the literary program Writers & Company as well as of The Arts Tonight, a daily arts magazine, both on CBC Radio. She is a frequent host and guest speaker at national and international literary events. Writers & Company has twice won the CBC National Award for Programming Excellence and Wachtel has published three volumes of interviews from the show. She has an honorary doctorate from four universities and is a member of the Order of Canada.
CAROLYN FORCHÉ is the author of four books of poetry: Gathering The Tribes, which received the Yale Younger Poets Award, The Country Between Us, chosen as the Lamont Selection of the Academy of American Poets, The Angel of History, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Award, and, most recently, Blue Hour, (2003), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has translated Flowers from the Volcano and Sorrow by Claribel Alegria, The Selected Poems of Robert Desnos (with William Kulik), and Mahmoud Darwish's Unfortunately, It Was Paradise (with Munir Akash). She compiled and edited Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness (1993) and has received three fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and in 1998 was given the Edita and Ira Morris Hiroshima Foundation Award for Peace and Culture in Stockholm for her work on behalf of human rights and the preservation of memory and culture.
THEO DORGAN was born in Cork in 1953. His poetry collections are The Ordinary House of Love (1991), Rosa Mundi (1995), and Sappho’s Daughter (1998). He has also published a selected poems in Italian, La Case ai Margini del Mundo (1999), and a Spanish translation of Sappho’s Daughter, La Hija de Safo, (2001). He has edited The Great Book of Ireland (with Gene Lambert, 1991), Revising the Rising (with Máirín Ní Dhonnachadha, 1991), Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh (1996), Watching the River Flow (with Noel Duffy, 1999), and The Great Book of Gaelic (with Malcolm Maclean, 2002). A former Director of Poetry
Ireland/Éigse Éireann, he has worked extensively as a broadcaster of literary programmes on both radio and television. He was presenter of Poetry Now on RTÉ Radio 1, and later presented RTÉ’s books programme, Imprint. Among his awards are the Listowel Prize for Poetry, 1992. A member of Aosdána, he was appointed to The Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon in 2003. He also serves on the Board of Cork European Capital of Culture 2005. He lives in Dublin.