Mary and Padraic Colum: Lives and the Dream (UCD Press) is an illuminating biography of two remarkable Irish writers: Padraic, a poet and playwright whose poems are still remembered today, and Mary, an influential writer and essayist whose work is now unjustly forgotten. Join us as author Margaret Kelleher discusses her book with Laureate of Irish Fiction, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne. The conversation will explore the Colums’ lives and careers, which span the Irish Literary Revival and twentieth-century literary circles in New York, and the challenges and rewards of writing a joint biography.

Please note Dublin Book Festival may be capturing imagery at this event for use on social media and website.

Martina Devlin’s Glorious Monsters (Lilliput Press) is a spellbinding reimagining of Rome’s Romantic circle, involving the brilliant, volatile, and dangerously entangled Shelleys. Emily Hourican’s A House in Winter (Eriu) is a story of family conflict and class tension set around Princess Margaret’s visit to Ireland in 1965. Henrietta McKervey’s The Woman in the Water (Hachette Ireland) is a twisty gothic mystery set between 1930s London and Cornwall. The authors join writer Neil Hegarty in conversation.

Please note Dublin Book Festival may be capturing imagery at this event for use on social media and website.

Adopt the stoic position, endure and learn? Accept death, whatever else it is, as educational? It often seems that’s what the culture would like us to do but in No One Tells You, the Last Years of Edna O’Brien (New Island) Gébler’s tack is that death is an appalling diminution about which there is nothing good to be said. Hurt is hurt. Grief isn’t educational—it’s enlarging, which is something else entirely.

Carlo Gébler’s most recent publications include I, Antigone, the biography of Oedipus as written by his daughter, Antigone, and A Cold Eye, Notes from a Shared Island 1989 – 2024. His latest memoir is, No One Tells You, the Last Years of Edna O’Brien. Carlo has been a prison teacher since the mid-1990s. He teaches at Trinity College Dublin, based in the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing. He is a member of Aosdána.

Please note Dublin Book Festival may be capturing imagery at this event for use on social media and website.

Join us for a series of four Twilight Talks, each just fifteen minutes! These talks are are intended to showcase the depth of scholarship, creativity and discovery emerging from registered readers' engagement with the library’s collections. 

Please find a brief abstract of each presentation below. 

Sarah Curran, 1782–1808: much more than a revolutionary’s girlfriend | Dr Angela Byrne

Sarah Curran (1782–1808) is usually remembered as a tragic figure: the secret fiancée of martyred United Irishman Robert Emmet.  She was at the heart of an important but long-forgotten circle of literary women centred around three notable Cork families – the Wilmots, Chetwoods and Penroses. The National Library of Ireland holds Curran’s only surviving letters, one of her music books, and a map of Ireland embroidered by her own hand. The items in the NLI collection are evidence of her rich intellectual and cultural life as a creative, cosmopolitan person: a talented harpist, an entertaining letter-writer, a great reader, a poet. Drawing on items from the NLI collection and underused sources from other Irish collections, this talk will reveal the woman behind the myth. 

Irish Homes and Houses: 1950s magazines for homeowners | Dr Stephanie Rains

The 1950s saw a rapid increase in home ownership as well as the construction of entire new estates everywhere from the Dublin suburbs to small towns across the country.  A new generation of first-time homeowners found themselves in possession of houses to decorate and furnish, gardens to plant, and roofs or plumbing to worry about. The National Library of Ireland’s periodicals collection holds the complete run Irish Home: the national family journal and Homeplanning: the magazine of better living. This talk will highlight the magazines’ mid-century aesthetics as well the insights they offer into the aspirations (if not often the reality) of homeowners who hoped for ‘better living’ in 1950s Ireland.

A Revival Can Only Be New Once: The Last Tailteann Games, 1932 | Dr Conor Heffernan

In June 1932, the Irish Free State staged the third and final modern Tailteann Games. Conceived in the 1920s as an international festival of Irish sport, culture and national ambition, the Games had once promised to rival the Olympics. Drawing on material held by the National Library of Ireland, including contemporary newspapers, programmes, photographs and promotional material, this talk explores how the final Games were presented to the public and what their decline reveals about the early Free State. The talk will show how the Tailteann Games moved from confident state-building project to contested historical inheritance, and why their disappearance mattered. 

Researching Michael Davitt in the National Library | Carla King

Michael Davitt was a member of the National Library and refers to a visit in one of his diaries. Carla King will briefly introduce Michael Davitt and his career, before addressing the range of sources available, in the form of manuscripts, books, pamphlets and journals, in microfilm and online. 

Specifically, it will consider the challenges of writing historical fiction about sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ireland, a period so dominated by tales of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I, of Shakespeare, of Thomas Cromwell, of Hamlet and Hamnet. What can historical fiction teach us about the past? What makes for ‘authentic’ historical fiction? How does fiction about early modern Ireland write ‘against the grain’, write the experience of colonialism, of ‘rebellion’, countering the grand narratives of Elizabethan glory? How does historical fiction for children intersect with the teaching curriculum when it comes to this period? How do questions of language play into the work and methods of historical fiction?

This is a bilingual event (English and Irish).

The contributors are Prof. Marie-Louise Coolahan (University of Galway), Dr Deirdre Serjeantson (University of Cambridge) and author Liam MacCóil (author of the Lucas Ó Briain trilogy, An Litir; I dTír Stráinséarach and Bealach na Spáinneach), who will also read from his work.

This event is the Annual Lecture event of the Society for Renaissance Studies (UK and Ireland), in collaboration with the National Library of Ireland.

Explore the people, events and other influences that would lead William Butler Yeats to write his most mysterious and esoteric work, A Vision, on this special tour of the National Library of Ireland’s Yeats Exhibition.

Running as part of the Dublin Festival of History

Join History Ireland editor, Tommy Graham, with Dr Sineád McCoole (National Library), Lar Joye (Heritage Director, Dublin Port), and Professor Breandán MacSuibhne (University of Galway), to discuss this collection of family letters that document the immense challenges faced by Irish emigrants to the USA during this period and describe separation, isolation, hardship and the horrors of war. With readings by Stephen Rea.

With a WB Yeats collection of over 2,000 items, the holdings of the National Library of Ireland are rich with materials providing different perspectives on one of Ireland's most famous writers, from draft works to personal correspondences to the contents of his personal library. 

Here Dr Neil Mann identifies key writings and objects which can be used to help understand Yeats' esoteric themes in this seminar for scholars looking to get to grips with this more mysterious and often challenging side of WB Yeats studies. 

Find the full programme of A Vision centenary events here: Celebrating A Century of A Vision | National Library of Ireland

Neil Mann delivers a workshop on applying  the system devised by WB and George Yeats to demonstrate the intended function of A Vision and provide insight into the thoughts and beliefs of one of Ireland's most celebrated writers. 

Discover the significance of the Moon in Yeats' wider body of work, the roles of Mask and Will in Yeats' Vision as well as what Yeats means in adopting the title of The Daimonic Man and how he came to believe he was bound to stand apart from the rest of the society in which he lived. 

Please note, the room in which this event will take place is not wheelchair accessible

Find the full programme of A Vision centenary events here: Celebrating A Century of A Vision | National Library of Ireland

Join the NLI to mark the centenary year of the publication of A Vision's first edition, WB Yeats' account of the passage of history and the journey of the soul with this introduction to the book by subject expert Dr Neil Mann, with opening words from the National Library of Ireland's Head of Special Collections, Crónán Ó Doibhlin. 

Steeped in symbolism and philosophy stemming from a lifetime of writing and magical experimentation, A Vision has long been regarded as a dense and challenging work to engage with. In this talk Neil Mann seeks to unpack and explain the various concepts crucial to understanding A Vision, providing insight into Yeats' esoteric life, his writings, his relationships and the occult system that lies at the heart of the book itself. 

This talk marks the launch of digitised material from the Yeats Occult Papers on to the NLI Catalogue, including the draft manuscript of A Vision. 

Find the full programme of A Vision centenary events here: Celebrating A Century of A Vision | National Library of Ireland