The Dingle Lit Podcast

Ep 4: Caitriona in Wunderland: Paula Shields speaks to Caitriona Lally

Caitriona Lally, author of Wunderland, discusses her writing with Paula Shields.

Caitriona Lally, údar Wunderland, ag labhairt faoina cuid scríbhneoireachta le Paula Shields.

 

Dublin writer Caitriona Lally’s first novel, Eggshells, was published in the US by Melville House (2017) and in the UK by Borough Press (2018). Eggshells, was shortlisted for the Newcomer of the Year Award at the 2015 Irish Book Awards and the Kate O’Brien Debut Novel Award. She is the 2018 winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and the 2019 recipient of the Lannan Fiction Fellowship.

Much media attention has been directed at the fact that Lally worked as on the housekeeping team in Trinity College, where she also studied English and returned to accept the prestigious Rooney Prize. However, with the lead character in her new novel working as a cleaner, it has clearly been a source of inspiration too.

 

Wunderland her second novel tells the story of Roy, exiled from Ireland under dubious circumstances, and now working as a cleaner at the Wunderland miniature exhibition in Hamburg. Struggling to connect with those around him, he commits secret acts of violence against the tiny scenes and figurines on display. Then, to Roy’s palpable annoyance, his sister Gert visits, determined to uncover what really prompted his sudden move abroad and carrying a threadbare hope that she might finally figure him out.

 

But Gert is fighting her own demons, having checked out of her exhausting family life where she is fading amidst her husband’s deepening depression. All the while, unbeknownst to her, Roy is planning something huge in this miniature world, a statement, an act of great destruction that might just be the best thing that ever happens to them.

 

Paula Shields is a writer, researcher, and interviewer. An arts journalist since the 1990s, she has worked in London, Galway and Dublin in print, TV and now radio – on Arena, RTÉ’s flagship arts show.
Other professional highlights include originating and researching the IFTA award-winning RTÉ TV documentary, Fairytale of New York, in 2017, and judging the 2017 and 2018 Irish Times Theatre Awards.

 

Buy Wunderland from the Dingle Book Shop or from your local bookshop 

For more information on Dingle Literary Festival find us online at https://dinglelit.ie/.

 

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Ep 2: Places of Poetry with Paul Muldoon and Nicholas McLachlan

In the second episode of The Dingle Lit Podcast, Paul Muldoon in conversation with Nicholas McLachlan discussing the places that informed his life and poetry

Paul Muldoon i gcomhrá le Nicholas McLachlan, iad ag plé na n-áiteanna a chuir bonn eolais faoina shaol agus faoina chuid filíochta

 

Kerry is a special place to Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Paul Muldoon. During the summer, while he holidayed in the Kingdom, he spoke with local poet Nicholas McLachlan, an interview which took a rambling journey around the places that informed his life and poetry, from his love of Kerry to growing up on the border of Armagh and Tyrone in Northern Ireland—with so many poems to read and so much to talk about, the fascinating conversation never quite made it back to his adopted home of the United States, where Muldoon has lived for over 30 years.

Paul Muldoon has been described by The Times Literary Supplement as “the most significant English-language poet born since the Second World War”. After reading English at Queen’s University, Belfast, Paul Muldoon published his first collection of poems, “New Weather”, in 1973, at the age of 21. He is the author of 14 full-length collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006). HIs latest book of poems is published this November. He is currently both the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities and Founding Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, where he has taught since 1987. He was also Professor of Poetry at Oxford University from 1999 to 2004, and poetry editor of the New Yorker from 2007 to 2017.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the 2003 Griffin Prize.

Learn more about Paul Muldoon here: https://www.paulmuldoonpoetry.com/

“One of the great poets of the past hundred years, who can be everything in his poems—word-playful, lyrical, hilarious, melancholy. And angry. Only Yeats before him could write with such measured fury.” — Roger Rosenblatt on Paul Muldoon in The New York Times.

 

Nicholas McLachlan is a founding member of the Dingle Literary Festival committee and a key leader of programme of Writers’ Workshops. Nicholas is a writer and teacher of poetry and fiction. His first collection of poetry, The Rain Barrel, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2015. His second collection is due in 2022. He received the Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship for 2016. He mentors individual writers and teaches creative writing, poetry and fiction to university, school and community groups.

 

For more information on Dingle Literary Festival find us online at https://dinglelit.ie

Catch us on: Facebook- https://www.facebook.com/Dingleliteraryfestival/Facebook

Instagram- https://www.instagram.com/dingle.lit/

Twitter- https://twitter.com/DingleLit

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