PLEASE NOTE DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCE NIALL WILLIAMS IS NO LONGER ABLE TO PARTICIPATE IN THIS EVENT.
“Mary Lawson has a remarkable gift for conjuring up place and people in a handful of words, a few lines of dialogue.”
Penelope Lively
“He writes prose of gravity and grace ... Line for line, it is hard to think of a more skilful contemporary Irish novelist. He shares with John McGahern a refusal of cheap flamboyance....."
Joseph O'Connor on David Park
Chairperson: Vanessa O’Loughlin The work of Mary Lawson and David Park explores the intricacies of human relationships with great exactitude and compassion. Since her first novel, Crow Lake, won the McKitterick Prize in Canada, Mary Lawson has been celebrated for her compassionate exploration of the lives of decent people struggling to get by in the bleak and hostile territory of Northern Ontario. Her Booker-longlisted second novel, The Other Side of the Bridge, charted the disintegration of two brothers in 1930s Ontario, while her new novel, Road Ends, moves to the 1960s to examine the devastating impact of the death of a young man. In The Poets' Wives, David Park explores three women, each destined to play the role of a poet’s wife: Catherine Blake, the wife of William Blake – a poet, painter and engraver who struggles for recognition in a society that dismisses him as a madman; Nadezhda Mandelstam, wife of Russian poet Osip Mandelstam, whose poetry costs him his life under Stalin’s terror; and the wife of a fictional contemporary Irish poet, who looks back on her marriage during the days after her husband’s death as she seeks to fulfil his final wish. Presented in association with Dublin City Public Libraries.