Dundalk Bough Bells Reading Festival

The Dundalk Bough Bells Reading Festival presents a poetry reading with Mary O'Donnell and Michael Farry on Saturday 10 May at 7.30 pm The venue is the Oriel Centre, Old Gaol, Dundalk.

I'm delighted to be involved in this event and delighted to be on the same bill as the wonderful Mary O'Donnell.

The event poster calls Mary a novelist but in fact she is also a well published poet having had five collections of poetry published. Her poetry has been translated into French, Romanian, and more recently, Chinese. She has also translated a selection of work by the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann.

Her fiction includes the best-selling literary novel, The Light-Makers, named The Sunday Tribune's Best New Irish Novel of 1992, Virgin and the Boy (1996), and collections of short stories, Strong Pagans (1991), and Storm Over Belfast (2008). She won the 2011 Fish International Short Story Prize. 

From 2pm until 5pm on the same day four northeast writing groups will read their prose and poetry in the Market Bar, Market Square, Dundalk.

Among the groups involved in this are the two writers groups I'm a member of, Boyne Writers Group and Cavan/Meath LitLab. It should be a great afternoon and evening.