Chairperson: Micheal O'Siadhail

"He spends his life wondering and thinking and daring to think and see differently… a serious contribution to the nation's mental and spiritual well-being."
Sunday Tribune

Lauded by such diverse admirers as Meryl Streep and Bono, Brendan Kennelly is an Irish literary phenomenon – a poet, dramatist and cult media figure whose broad appeal spans generations and cultures. Join the former Professor of Modern Literature at Trinity College for his first Dublin reading in 3 years.

With over 30 volumes to his name, including the suitably scabrous Poetry My Arse and the number one best-selling Book of Judas, Kennelly’s down-to-earth colloquial style has often lent him the tag of ‘people's poet’. Yet it is his uncanny facility for inhabiting the ‘other’ – other lives, other beings, other ways of being – that will be his lasting legacy. His brand new Bloodaxe collection Reservoir Voices adds a further dimension to these explorations. During an autumn sojourn in America, Kennelly was mesmerised by a palimpsest of ‘voices, images, memories, delights, horrors, rhythms [and] insights…’ that trespassed on his lonely contemplation with ‘irrefutable insistence’.

For Kennelly poetry is ‘an attempt to cut through the effects of deadening familiarity… to reveal that inner sparkle…’ Who better then than Dublin's favourite ‘roamer, raconteur, poet and pundit’ to unveil that ‘human miracle’ in all its glory.