“I never daydreamed about love or money, I always daydreamed I was making eloquent speeches that stirred ten thousand people to feel their lives, and to act.”

For nearly fifty years, Vivian Gornick’s essays have explored feminism and writing, literature and culture, politics and personal experience. Interviewer Sinéad Gleeson describes her as “one of the most important essayists of all time … urgent, sharp-eyed and vital”. We’re delighted to welcome Vivian Gornick to ILFDublin to discuss her exciting new collection, Taking A Long Look: Essays on Culture, Literature and Feminism in Our Time. Composed with her characteristic clarity of perception and mesmerizing, thrilling style, her new collection explores the painful process of understanding one’s self that binds us to the larger world.

In conversation with writer, editor and freelance broadcaster Sinéad Gleeson, whose bestselling debut Constellations won Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2019.

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This event is part of our Forms & Influences series. 

From the holy voice of Aretha Franklin to the precision of Beckett’s prose, the influences on a writers’ vision come in many guises. Forms & Influences explores the artistic minds and motivations of Rachel Kushner, Lydia Davis, André Aciman, Hanif Abdurraqib, Vivian Gornick and Salman Rushdie, celebrates the essay and traces the arc of a writer’s life, from formative years to mature reflection, through real life and artistic epiphany.

With each book a cultural playlist between hardcovers, join us and set forth on along new pathways of discovery.

IMAGE: Mitch Bach