BAIS CULTURAL PROGRAMME

Institute of Irish Studies, Liverpool. More details on booking to follow.

Please find our CFP here. 

Thursday 2 July – What If? A Play by Patricia Downey (Spanner in the Works Theatre)

Friday 3 July – Eimear McBride in conversation with Professor Derval Turbidy (Goldsmiths)

Saturday 4 July – Tony Doherty and Jimmy McGovern in conversation

Biographies

PATRICIA DOWNEY/SPANNER IN THE WORKS THEATRE

Spanner in the Works Theatre Company (SITW) was established in Belfast in September 1998 and is led by Artistic Director Patricia Downey – an accomplished director and writer with twenty years’ experience in theatre and workshop facilitation.

SITW specialises in working with women, young people, schools and people with disabilities to explore a range of social concerns through the medium of drama.

Using drama workshops and devised pieces, the company develops productions exploring contemporary social issues that aim to challenge, provoke and engage audiences. We have addressed a number of important issues including dementia, domestic violence, binge drinking, Internet safety, human trafficking, racism, and legal highs.

What If? tells the story of one mother’s loss following the Shankill Bomb in October 1993.

EIMEAR MCBRIDE

Eimear McBride’s debut novel A Girl is a Half-formed Thingwon the Bailey’s Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize and Irish Novel of the Year. The Lesser Bohemians won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and was shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award. In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural Creative Fellowship at the Beckett Research Centre, University of Reading. The resulting performance work Mouthpieces was recorded and broadcast by RTÉ Radio. Strange Hotel is her latest novel.

TONY DOHERTY

Tony Doherty is a Derry-based writer who has recently finished a trilogy of memoirs. The subject of his memoirs is his enduring relationship with his father who was executed on Bloody Sunday in 1972. His first book This Man’s Wee Boy was published in 2016 providing a boy’s observational account of pre-Troubles Derry as it approached the Civil Rights era and the early stages of the civil conflict.

His second book The Dead Beside Us is a childhood-to-teenage memoir of living and loving through dark and violent days of the 1970s. And his third memoir The Skelper and Me, named after his father’s nickname, takes the reader right up to 2010 when the British Government accepted responsibility and apologised for the killing and wounding on Bloody Sunday. All are published by Mercier Press in Cork.

In 2017-19 he performed in Sounds Like a Boy’s Life, a unique musical/literary collaboration with the Ulster Orchestra.

Tony works for the Healthy Living Centre Alliance, a community-led network of health and well-being organisations in the north of Ireland and is involved in aspects of health service reform. He lives in Derry with his wife Stephanie, sons Rossa and Oscar and greyhound Sunnie.

@tonydutchdoc

The Dead Beside Us is packed with the wicked wit, devilment and sheer badness of Derry’s black humour. Tony Doherty has amply earned the right to tell his story as part of Ireland’s story. Frank McGuinness, Playwright and Author

It’s a wonderful memoir. So simple, so truthful and, at the end, so profoundly moving. Jimmy McGovern, Screen-writer

The Skelper and Me The really comes into its own when he returns to his home in Derry.  Working class communities are often depicted as desolate and rife with crime.  This book is a welcome corrective to the stereotype. There is immense love and respect and good humour in Doherty’s depiction of his extended family and his community.  Susan McKay, Author and Journalist

JIMMY MCGOVERN

Jimmy McGovern is a screenwriter and producer. He created the television series Cracker (1993–1995) for which he received two Edgar Awards from the Mystery Writers of America. He has also received recognition for The Lakes (1997-1999), The Street (2006-2009) and Accused (2010-2012), among others.