Brian Moore at 100 – 8 Dec

To mark the centenary of the birth of Belfast-born writer Brian Moore (1921-1999) Brian Moore at 100 and the Irish Literary Society have partnered to screen The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (7 December) and deliver tonight’s talk with Dr Sinéad Moynihan and Lucy Caldwell. Designed to coincide with the centenary of his birth, the Exeter University project has sought to critically appraise, and thus revive scholarly and public interest in, the work of neglected and important Belfast-born writer, Brian Moore (1921- 1999). Moore was the author of twenty-six novels in diverse genres and a transnational subject who lived most of his adult life in Canada and the U.S. Our talk and the project more generally invite and stimulate a fresh look at Moore’s multi-genre literary career.

Speaker: Lucy Caldwell

Caldwell was born in Belfast in 1981. She is the author of three novels and several stage plays and radio dramas. Awards include the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Dylan Thomas Prize, the George Devine Award for Most Promising Playwright, the BBC Stewart Parker Award, a Fiction Uncovered Award and a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland. Her debut collection of short stories, Multitudes, was published by Faber in 2016, of it she has written ‘…the music of Van Morrison in general and of Astral Weeks in particular is something of a guiding spirit to my stories.’ Lucy is the editor of Being Various: New Irish Short Stories (Faber, 2019); she is the 2021 winner of the BBC National Short Story Award for her story ‘All the People Were Mean and Bad‘.Lucy Caldwell will publish her long-awaited fourth novel These Days in March 2022.

Speaker: Professor Sinéad Moynihan

Professor Sinéad Moynihan is an American Studies specialist her research interests include Transatlantic Literary Studies and, particularly, the Irish Atlantic. Her third monograph, Ireland, Migration and Return Migration: The “Returned Yank” in the Cultural Imagination, 1952 to Present was published by Liverpool UP in March 2019 and was awarded the Michael J. Durkan Prize for Books on Language and Culture by the American Conference for Irish Studies. She is the co-investigator on the British Academy / Leverhulme funded project, Brian Moore at 100.