Tara Bergin – 14 Nov

The Irish Literary Society is delighted to invite its members to the Embassy of Ireland for an evening with one of Ireland’s most fascinating poets. As there are only limited seats available for this event interested members should apply for tickets via the form below.

Tara Bergin’s debut collection, This is Yarrow, won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and she was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014.

Bergin’s Gothic imagination – precise, claustrophobic, yet full of vertiginous perspectives – makes her a perfect guide to these frightened, frightening times.Paul Batchelor, The Spectator

She will be reading poems from her new collection The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx, exploring themes of intense love and grief with a dark humour. Bergin’s engagement with the world of myth and folklore was vividly present in This is Yarrow and now in her latest dark fairytale-like images fill the collection as it reflects on the life and death of Eleanor – Karl Marx’s youngest daughter. Eleanor was a member of the Socialist Democratic Federation and translated Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, before taking her own life in the same way as Emma Bovary. The event will be hosted by the Irish Ambassador Adrian O’Neill.

Speaker: Tara Bergin
Tara Bergin was born in Dublin and moved to the UK in 2002 to undertake academic research. This culminated in a PhD on Ted Hughes’s translations of the post-war Hungarian poet János Pilinszky which she completed at Newcastle University, where she is now a part-time lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry). She began publishing the poems that feature in her debut collection, This is Yarrow (Carcanet, 2013), in 2003. It won the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize and the 2014 Shine/Strong Award. Bergin was named a Next Generation Poet by the Poetry Book Society in 2014.