Join ILFD for a very special celebration of the life and work of Tim Robinson, the English writer, cartographer, mathematician, artist and illustrator who spent more than 40 years chronicling the west of Ireland. Best known for his two-volume Stones of Aran and the Connemara trilogy:  Listening to the Wind, The Last Pool of Darkness, and A Little Gaelic Kingdom, his many awards included the Irish Book Awards literature medal and the Rooney prize special award for literature. His final book, Experiments on Reality, was published last year. Fintan O’Toole noted in his Irish Times review of Experiments on Reality, “It is the planet itself that he seeks, not just the particular rainy western Irish corners of it. His subject is nothing less than ‘our aesthetic, corporeal and affective relationships with the earth’. That is, surely, the most urgent subject of our times.”

Fintan O’Toole is joined by some of Tim Robinson’s friends and collaborators; poet Moya Cannon, photographer Nicolas Fève, and Robert Macfarlane, to discuss his influence on their own work, whether written or visual, and their meetings and collaborations with him across the Irish landscape.

Moya Cannon has published six collections, the most recent being Donegal Tarantella. The mountains, the sea and our primal and enduring responses to the beauty of the endangered earth are the inspiration for much of her work. Tim Robinson’s work introduced her to what she describes as the “intimate corners of the landscapes and sea edges of the Aran Islands, the Burren and Connemara”. Nicolas Fève is a French-born photographer living in Ireland. His photographic practice focuses on the relationship between text and image, and plays with the idea of the photograph as page. In 2015, he collaborated with Tim Robinson on Connemara and Elsewhere.

British writer Robert Macfarlane is best known for his books on landscape, nature, place, people and language. He described Tim Robinson as, “The Proust and Ruskin of modern place-writing, deep-mapper of Irish landscapes, visionary thinker, and human of exceptional intellectual generosity and kindness.”

Presented by the International Literature Festival Dublin, a Dublin City Council initiative, with kind support by Galway 2020 and IPB.