Sara Baume and Doireann Ní Ghríofa

In this event writers and friends Sara Baume and Doireann Ní Ghríofa discuss the experience of releasing new books this year and how 2020 has affected their creativity as well as providing us with a behind-the-scenes look at their books.

Earlier this year Sara Baume and Doireann Ní Ghríofa both had new books published by Tramp Press and for each of them it was a foray into a new genre. After two critically-acclaimed novels, Sara wrote her first non-fiction book handiwork whilst A Ghost In The Throat is the first prose piece by Doireann who was previously best known for her poems in Irish and English.

In handiwork, a contemplative short narrative, artist and acclaimed writer Sara Baume charts the daily process of making and writing, exploring what it is to create and to live as an artist. Elegantly encompassing images and in itself a significant artifact, handiwork offers observations that are at once gentle and devastating on the nature of art, grief and a life lived well. A glimpse into the process of one Ireland’s best writers, handiwork is Sara’s non-fiction debut, written with the keen eye for nature and beauty as well as the extraordinary versatility Sara’s fans have come to expect.

‘This little book is a love‐child of my art and writing practices, or a by‐product of novels past and coming. It’s about the connection between handicraft and bird migration, as well as simply the account of a year spent making hundreds of small, painted objects in an isolated house.’ Sara Baume

Award-winning writer Doireann Ní Ghríofa made her prose debut with A Ghost in the Throat, weaving candid personal memoir, in a fluid hybrid of essay and auto-fiction, with a literary mystery story, as she tries to track down the circumstances behind a murderous attack in the late 1700s that inspired ‘the greatest poem written in either Ireland or Britain during the eighteenth century.’ In 1773 Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill, on discovering her husband has been murdered, drinks handfuls of his blood and composes the extraordinary poem Caoineadh Airt Uí Laoghaire. In the present day, a young mother narrowly avoids tragedy in her own life. On encountering the poem, she becomes obsessed with finding out the full truth of the story.

‘When I brew myself a cup of tea, something always interrupts me, and my tea grows slowly cold while I buzz about more chores, with a baby on one shoulder and a dish-towel on the other. I have made my peace with drinking repeatedly abandoned and re-microwaved tea. Once the baby sleeps, I sit and blow again on that old steam, and Eibhlín Dubh tiptoes in to join me in my daydreams. I am never alone.’  Doireann Ní Ghríofa

This is a paid online event. You can pre-order the event now and it will be streamed on the same page at 7pm GMT on the 30th of November 2020 and will be available to view for 24 hours.

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