Zadie Smith and Nick Laird join Rick O’Shea on the opening night of the West Cork Literary Festival
This Friday, 8th July sees the start of the West Cork Literary Festival, kicking off with Nick Laird and Zadie Smith in conversation with Rick O’Shea at 8.30pm in The Maritime Hotel.
Zadie Smith is the award-winning author of the novels White Teeth, The Autograph Man, On Beauty, NW and Swing Time, as well as two collections of essays, Changing My Mind and Feel Free, and a collection of short stories, Grand Union.
Her first play The Wife of Willesden was published by Hamish Hamilton in November 2021.
It was performed at the Kiln Theatre in London between November 2021 and January 2022 and she won Most Promising Playwright at The Critics Circle Theatre Awards 2022.
Nick Laird is the author of three novels Modern Gods, Glover’s Mistake and Utterly Monkeyand, four collections of poetry, Feel Free, Go Giants, On Purpose and To a Fault. The New Yorker said of his poetry collection, Go Giants, that it ‘celebrates the jagged coexistence of the glorious and the mundane, the classical and the contemporary, the whimsical and the deadly serious’, and ‘the range of these scrupulous poems suggests there is little in form or content that Laird cannot master.’
Nick Laird’s eviscerating and moving elegy to his father, ‘Up Late’ has been shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. You can read it in full here.
Admission is €20 and you can book tickets here.
